Buzz marketing engages users as brand ambassadors. Several aspects need to be considered for social network marketing success, like sharing pertinent contents and to target the matching audience.

Methology/Research methods
Silverpop, as specialist for digital marketing, regularly publishes case studies. The following steps are partly based on this practical experience, but also on corresponding literature.

Over the last years, customers and prospects are more and more inclining towards forming online social communities, blogs and networks not just to stay in touch with friends, but also to exchange views on brands and businesses. This is a challenge that marketers have to face lately.

1. Determine Your Strategy and Find Your Key Channels

A company should elaborate a marketing strategy that matches with their overall and social media goal. Social media can be used as a sale, promotion, customer support and communication channel. The enterprise needs to locate the social networks where the real target group is active. In general, users are active on various platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. B2C marketing focuses on entertaining platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, where promotions take place and costumers get engaged. B2B marketing is more informative and uses channels such as Blogs or Twitter.

2. Create Content That Connects

A pertinent, engaging and share-worthy content is still the most important part of any campaign to evoke a two-way dialogue with the customer. However, the style and voice of the messages have to be linear and adapted to the specific channel. Articles are more detailed; Twitter on the other hand, has to catch the reader in just 140 characters. Furthermore, Tweets as well as blog post are additional inbound links that will show up in search engines and thus, using the right keywords can increase the overall site traffic through the search engines. Consistency is expected and will even increase this traffic further.

3. Engage & Monitor the Marketplace

The best scenario is seeing the message go viral, that means social network users spread it themselves. Companies need to start posting content on networks that encourages people to participate and that is related to the company’s activity without being perceived as advertisement. Monitoring people's activity in social networks will help to understand and interact with them. The more interaction, the better the viral marketing is. It can be monitored for example by measuring how often the customers share the message. The final step consists of analyzing the data obtained by social media monitoring, figuring out mistakes and eliminating them.

4. Identify and Enable Influencers

Given that social media marketing is most effective when it’s costumer to costumer, companies can use these already established connections to promote their product. Potential brand ambassadors, such as fans or bloggers have to be identified and engaged. Regular contact and special offers will increase their loyalty and as a result, will make them to believable promoters. The company should deal with criticism immediately, in public or in private, to demonstrate its awareness.

5. Conclusion

All in all, Buzz Marketing is an inexpensive and fast way to promote products in the Internet. Original and engaging content will involve users of various social networks and they will participate by spreading it. This results in an increasing visibility and further attachment to the brand.

6. References

Stokes, R. (2008). eMarketing: The essential guide to digital marketing. s.l.: Quirk eMarketing.

Silverpop (2010). Buzz Building: 7 Steps to Social Media Marketing Success. White Paper. [Online]. Available at: http://www.silverpop.com/marketing-resources/white-papers/download/social-media-success.html (Accessed: 22. October 2012)

Pelet, J. (2012) The Buzz Marketing: Electronic Word of Mouth. [Online]. Available at: http://emarketinpress.wordpress.com/buzz/ (Accessed: 10. November 2012)

Facebook (2012). Starbucks. Available at: http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks (Accessed: 08. November 2012)

Twitter (2012). Starbucks. Available at: https://fr.twitter.com/Starbucks (Accessed: 08. November 2012)

Youtube (2012). Starbucks. Available: http://www.youtube.com/user/Starbucks (Accessed: 08. November 2012)