FORTE CULTURA E-Marketing-Guide

Guideline for effective e-marketing for fortified heritage 23 6 S OCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SMM) These days social media marketing provides very effective measures. It uses social media as platforms for viral marketing. Social media includes primarily social networks like Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, but also blogs, microblogs like Twitter, media sharing sites like YouTube, wikis, forums, etc. The idea behind social media marketing is that interesting, exciting, funny, informative or useful free content should attract the attention of network users and be shared between them within the shortest time possible. Just the variety of topics your fortress provides makes an excellent base for interesting stories and posts. Social media marketing is, however, also one of the biggest challenges in online marketing. Here you can enter into direct communication with your customers, live and in real time. They can be critical and unadorned, sometimes also emotional. What do the visitors of your fortress think about the new exhibition, the last concert or the coffee served in the restaurant? Your active participation in social media can influence public opinion about your fortress. In addi- tion, all your network activities will promote searchability of your website. If not used thought- fully, social media marketing has a great risk of having your good reputation built up for years by conventional means, destroyed within minutes. You have to take advantage of many opportunities social networks offer for your fortress. But before you start: think for yourself whether SMM fits into your company strategy and especially to your target audience. If you decide to become active in this area, also costs and resources must be well planned and objectives should be defined. Possible objectives that you can pursue with social media marketing are: Image care, opinion research Increasing awareness, generating traffic exchanging information providing support strengthening customer loyalty The benefits of social media marketing are enormous and the profits can be huge, but you must be aware of the SMM is not a measure that can be done quickly and then neglected. It requires regularity and especially planning strategic themes and content for the various social media channels. Every opinion counts. Even negative opinions must be commented. A storm of nega- tive comments can damage your image significantly.