After deciding that social media marketing was the avenue for my graduate career, I have been delving into the ins and outs of varying social strategies. These two categories of social media strategy can be called “outbound” and “inbound”. They shouldn’t be confused with inbound or outbound digital marketing strategies. In the case of these social media categories, we’re being a little more straight forward than that. An outbound social media marketing strategy is what most who believe in social media want to achieve. They feel that social media is a venue through which to reach people, communicate, improve branding, and expose the company’s messages. Its goal is to be aggressive and take advantage of the fact that the masses are using social media regularly. In many cases, customers are spending more time on social media than any other digital activity. It’s about returning on investment, creating revenue and becoming a leader in social marketing. An inbound social media strategy is very different from a pure inbound marketing strategy. It can be viewed as a defensive posture, a way of covering social media without much time or effort. It’s about checking off the social media task box with little effort and costings. This is the type of strategy that a business should employ if they either do not believe in social media as an appropriate marketing venue or they do not have the time and/or budget to put a true effort towards an outbound strategy.
The strategies in more detail:
- Outbound Social Media Marketing: This is an “all in” strategy. It focuses on the beliefs that lots of people are on social media, that sites like Facebook have the data that can be used for targeting them with the right messages, and that either ideas or website clicks can be driven through an aggressive advertising component.
- Inbound Social Media Presence: Less aggressive than the latter, hence why I did not call it “marketing”. With an inbound strategy, a business is simply creating and managing a presence so that they are there without putting in much effort. It’s not a defeatist strategy by any means. For many, they have not found the benefits of social media or they’re not ready to invest what it takes to have a strong marketing strategy, so they simply get their social media covered.
This is important because people will visit pages and profiles. Most businesses have buttons that lead to their social media profiles right there on their website. The search engines will often rank social media profiles and pages high on search results for the business by name. Making sure that pages have an ongoing flow of content is important while not being too time consuming or expensive.
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