Helping companies create a social media platform or channel that’s going to last as long as their business and make connections with existing and potential costumers.

Would you believe that one day, most major corporations will maintain lifelong connections with their customers through a social media platform.  If you want to know why, ask yourself these questions:

• How many times did you change your phone number?
• How many times did you change your e-mail address?
• Now … can you envision changing your Facebook profile?
• Will you abandon all your friends and set a new one? NO of course not.

Lifelong connection with people, that’s what it’s about.

Many marketers think that doing a sponsorship on MySpace or posting a one-off campaign channel on YouTube is social media … that’s not true

Social media is about socializing, it’s about:

Weaving your content and messages into the social web

• Don’t focus on getting people to your website right away
• Join your customer conversation
• Talk about your brand and how many wonderful things it can do
• Befriend your customers and maintain regular communication with those friends
• Listening to what they have to say
• Reply and comment on it
• Measure and analyze the impact

A simple example:

• One person joins your group or fan page >> 60 (average number of Facebook friends per user) of his friends find out
• 40,000 people join in >> 2,400,000 find out (massive FREE advertising and brand recognition). Wow!

So what do you have to do?

1. Launch a brand platform
2. Start making brand impressions using press releases stating your Facebook presence
3. It will be a good idea to offer an incentive for joining you group (i.e.: discount code, helpful tools or applications, etc.)
4. Make as much friends as possible and chat with them as often as you can
5. Connect with bloggers and offer them free content about your brand (make them feel special!)
6. Push out relevant interesting content

Now you have created brand Impressions, what will happen next?

People will comment, post and share. Now you have created a very valuable peer-endorsed connection with your existing or potential costumers, and they’re spreading your message automatically to the people around them!

Creating the never-ending loop!
As your customers and friends comment on your posts, videos, status updates and twitter tweets, their friends are seeing that “my trusted friend” has commented on this product. They’re thinking, “Let’s check out this company profile. If my friend likes it, maybe I’ll become a fan too!”

Basic social media example:

1. Nancy logs in to Facebook and reads through her news feed
2. Nancy sees that her good friend Diane became a fan of ZARA
3. Nancy clicked on the ZARA fan page to check it out
4. Nancy also loves ZARA, so she became a fan too
5. well .. Because Nancy is so excited that she found ZARA’s fan page, she invits Lisa, Suzy and Cindy to join the fan group
6. oh guess what Lisa, Suzy and Cindy did?
7. ZARA has built up over 1,200,000 fans!

Again, if the average Facebook user has 60 friends on his account, that mean more than 72 million messages have been sent out to their friends about ZARA! We’re talking big numbers now!

The best part is that there are no expenses attached to the 72 million messages. It’s all free and it’s all automatic!

Written by: Bassem Ghali

Popularity: 13%

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