Social media marketing [Book] : a strategic approach / Melissa S. Barker, Donald I. Barker, Nicholas F. Bormann, Krista E. Neher.

' Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach promises to be the seminal textbook in the field with its distinctive conceptual foundation and practical approach to developing successful social media marketing plans. A proven eight-step social media planning model provides students with a cumulative learning experience, showing them how to construct social media strategies that achieve desired marketing goals. These marketing goals shape the development of tailored social media strategies. Special attention is given to the most effective techniques for identifying targeted marketing on the social web, with emphasis on the creation of personas that represent the critical online market segments for a company. Students discover how to put these well-defined personas to work in ing the optimal social media platforms for reaching an organization's marketing goals. Students are taught rules of engagement and social media ethics for behaving properly as marketers on the social web. With these guidelines in mind, the most productive marketing tactics for each type of major social media platform are examined in depth. These platform-specific tactics, along with all the proceeding material in the book, are brought together in the final chapter to create a comprehensive social media marketing plan, with detailed explanations and illustrations from a real world plan. Extensive consideration is given to monitoring, evaluating, and tuning the implementation of social media marketing initiatives. In addition, students are introduced to the most useful quantitative and qualitative social media measurements, along with various ways to estimate an organization's return on investment in social media marketing activities.

The major structural framework for the textbook is a comprehensive eight-step strategy for developing a winning social media marketing plan. The student learns how to listen to the social web to identify marketing opportunities and potential target audiences, then is shown how to set marketing goals and strategies to take advantage of these factors, as well as ing the optimal social media tools and implementation tactics to execute, monitor, and tune social media marketing campaigns for success. Each step in this distinctive social media planning model is presented in a way that creates a powerful cumulative learning experience for the student, resulting in a richly textured overview of the conceptual and practical knowledge necessary to effectively implement social media marketing initiatives. Chapters use numerous landmark case studies that highlight the best practices in social media marketing, featuring forward-thinking Fortune 500 companies, innovative small businesses, and adaptive non-profit organizations. Each chapter concludes with exercises that reinforce key concepts by providing topics for classroom discussion. These topics focus on how to apply marketing tactics to the major types of social media platforms, such as blogs, social networks, video and photo sharing sites, microblogs (Twitter), podcasts, social news sites, online communities, and article directories. The final chapter and appendix draw on all the key information presented throughout the textbook to provide detailed explanations and illustrations of how to apply the eight-step social media planning model in constructing an extensive real world social media marketing plan

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