Social Media is the ideal drip marketing solution. It offers you that limited time and space to make small and growing impacts. The key to adding it effectively to your marketing mix, is to schedule and deploy a campaign in a timed fashion. (See below for definition of email drip marketing)
For example:
Newsletters both electronic and print:
Drip short messages about each article. At the end of each month you then provide the full newsletter your effective readership will increase substantially.
Event promotions:
Drip hints, updates, and information about the events in a timed campaign, building anticipation of the event. The campaign would culminate in a full out push campaign that should be delivered via all marketing mediums to insure the highest effective rates.
Promotion or Sale:
Drip information about the sale. For example a retail store could offer greater discounts on single products everyday leading up to the sale. Then offering all the products on sale on the designated day. This could affect a drip of increased traffic over time to the store, with a flood of traffic at the day of the sale. The campaign should culminate in a larger blast announcement using the various marketing mediums to insure the greatest impact.
Used correctly the Social Networks are powerful additions to your marketing plan, it allows you to increase your marketing with out substantially increasing your budget.
Now if there was just a really cool application to help you manage your Social drip marketing.
Email Drip Marketing from Wikipedia:
E-mail drip marketing is a form of e-mail marketing where a company sends (“drips”) e-mail messages to subscribers on a scheduled basis established using e-mail marketing software.[1]
As an example, a real estate lead may be interested in home listings for a specific area. He could be sent an introductory message, then be placed on an automated e-mail drip campaign where updated home listings are sent to him on a weekly basis.
E-mail drip marketing can be an extremely effective way to brand a business to big ticket leads that may still be in “research mode” for weeks if not months.[2] A lead may be more inclined to do business with a company whose email drip marketing campaign is effective, meaning that the company has sent him helpful information throughout the research period.