There is an increasing trend towards using social media monitoring tools that allow marketers to search, track and analyse conversation on the web about their brand or about topics of interest. This can be useful in PR management and campaign tracking, allowing the user to measure return on investment, competitor-auditing and general public engagement. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, more in-depth tools.
The honeycomb framework defines how social media services focus on some or all of seven functional building blocks.[3] These building blocks help explain the engagement needs of the social media audience. For instance, LinkedIn users are thought to care mostly about identity, reputation and relationships, whereas YouTube’s primary features are sharing, conversations, groups and reputation. Many companies build their own social containers that attempt to link the seven functional building blocks around their brands. These are private communities that engage people around a more narrow theme, as in around a particular brand, vocation or hobby, rather than social media containers such as Google+ or Facebook and also Twitter. PR departments face significant challenges in dealing with viral negative sentiment directed at organizations or individuals on social media platforms (dubbed "sentimentitis"), which may be a reaction to an announcement or event.[13]
Types of Internet marketing
Internet marketing is broadly divided in to the following types:[13][better source needed]
- Display advertising: the use of web banners or banner ads placed on a third-party website or blog to drive traffic to a company's own website and increase product awareness.[13]
- Search engine marketing (SEM): a form of marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of either paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion, or through the use of free search engine optimization techniques also known as organic result.[14]
- Search engine optimization (SEO): the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.
- Social media marketing: the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.[15]
- Email marketing: directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail.
- Referral marketing: a method of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually word of mouth.
- Affiliate marketing: a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.
- Content marketing: the process of creating specialized content such as infographics, blog articles and ebooks to attract more customers.
- Inbound marketing: involves creating and freely sharing informative content as a means of converting prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers.
- Video marketing: This type of marketing specializes in creating videos that engage the viewer into a buying state by presenting information in video form and guiding them to a product or service[citation needed] Online video is increasingly becoming more popular among internet users and companies are seeing it as a viable method of attracting customers.[16]
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