10 Top Business Tips For Social Media Marketing
Social networks started out as personal and fun but quickly caught the attention of businesses looking for new avenues of promotion and sales
. Creative social media marketing will help you achieve some top business goals, including:- Generating Web site traffic
- Converting interest into sales
- Increasing page views and ad exposure
- Growing your brand awareness
- Creating positive brand associations and reputation
- Spurring business development and a wider customer outreach
How does it work?
The social networks let you interact with all kinds of other people, to whom you can promote content that will get links and start the viral process. With the correct strategies you really can reach the people we call influencers, the opinion leaders you want to have take an interest in you and your product or service. Blogs alone can do some of this and are very search engine friendly off the shelf.
You need to do research, you need to think differently (it has done real well for Apple) and you need to completely disabuse yourself of the notion that you can game the system or fake your way through. Sincerity really does translate in this environment, and so does fakery and phoniness. The following top 10 business tips for social media marketing will assume that you have a good, functioning Web site, and if you do not, get some help from a top firm so you can start out strong.
(1) Assist, do not lecture: Limit the amount you talk about yourself, especially at first. Provide assistance, help others and remember that it is not about you and your shot at fame. This is the number one tip because it is really the most important one. It will be very difficult to recover from a bad start, so be careful.
(2) Content is still King: You need to offer quality content. The community aspect may be Queen, but good, helpful, usable information is still King, and will be for some time (probably forever). Many more people are reading that writing good material. This is a large opening for you. If you cannot create good content yourself, once again, get help!
(3) Connect and position yourself: You need to reach out to the influencers in your industry. You might be surprised at what an honest, sincere request might accomplish. You also need to get out front with the consumer's passions, so positioning is key. This is how you build brand advocates.
(4) Ye olde blog: There are something like 115 million blogs now, according to Technorati. In fact, if you have a blog, go claim it at Technorati so that you get indexed in their blog search engine and become part of the updates they send out.
(5) Links: Linking to other blogs and sites is drop-dead simple and necessary, too. Often called spreading the link love.
(6) Audio-visual interest: Videos are consumed at a frantic pace these days. If you do a how-to video, you can throw it up on YouTube, which has such a wide reach that millions of people might just find you. You can even get wider distribution with such tools as tubemogul.com and vidmetrix.com.
(7) Analytics: Make sure you look at your numbers daily or at least weekly. If you do not know what they mean, once again (and maybe not even for the last time), get some help!
(8) Micro and mini communities: These are the smallest groups relevant to your industry, niche, product or service. It is easier to be heard in smaller environments, of course, but the downside is that it takes longer to find them than just hitting the biggies. Still, it is important, and you will get great return on your efforts if you follow the other tips, particularly about quality content.
(9) Submit: From the list of resources below, submit content to a few, or as many as you can without sacrificing content quality. There is a lot of seat time at the computer involved, but it pays you back handsomely if you do it right. Without gaming the system, get friends and acquaintances to comment or vote on your postings. Do not spam anyone, for Pete's sake, and do not try to stuff the ballot box. You could lose you account.
(10) Monitor: You can save time tracking all your activity in the social network scene with Yahoo Pipes, sort of a social monitoring program in a browser.
Starter resources
These are the top starter resources for social network marketing, not in order of importance, size or quality (they are all good or they would not make the list). Most have toolbars that you can download to manage and maintain your efforts.
- YouTube
- Del.icio.us
- StumbleUpon
- Flickr
- Digg
- Technorati
- Newsvine
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