What is social media marketing?

- [Voiceover] Historically, all my marketing was a fairly one-sided approach. Businesses pushed ideas out, and consumers passively received them. But that landscape has shifted. The Internet has become extremely interactive. Social media has created a new style of communication and there are now billions of conversations happening online. People are discussing popular news articles, sharing photos of their pets, and even engaging with brands. And it all feels relatively natural to the consumer. It's just part of how the Web operates.

All of these conversations present exciting opportunities for marketers. We can join in on a conversation to drive brand awareness, or create our own conversations and empower our customers to do the marketing for us. Social media marketing is all about creating interactive moments with our customers to achieve a goal we've defined. Most often that goal is to gain traffic to our website or attention on our brand. But unlike other forms of marketing, social media taps into the idea of using your customer as a marketing vessel.

The content that you share will hopefully be liked, retweeted, shared again, blogged about, and so on. This viral effect is what makes social media marketing so effective. A simple like on a post could expose that content to hundreds of potential customers you normally wouldn't have access to. Because social media is so personal, when friends share content, it comes with another layer of credibility. Done right, social media has the potential to transform your business. However, it will require a good strategy, some creativity, and a little bit of luck.

Done wrong, and social media might bring unwanted attention which could potentially harm your business or your brand image. In this course, we're going to focus mainly on the organic aspects of social media marketing. More specifically, the unpaid and natural approach to distributing content. For many brands, social media will be a must-have component of your digital marketing strategy. Your social media might feature the major networks or it could be as simple as a blog, a customer forum, or a small niche bookmarking site.

In this course, however, I'll be focusing on marketing with the big two, Facebook and Twitter. Now these two networks are not the same. Each is unique and has its own best practices, style, and audience, and we'll explore their differences together in a later movie. Social media is a moving target. If you're able to adapt and scale alongside of it, your brand will benefit in the long term.