Thursday, December 27, 2012

Strengthen Your Marketing Strategy With Social Media

By Steve Jones


Social media for personal use and social media for your business are two different worlds. If you are used to using these sites for your own personal satisfaction then you are ahead of the game in understanding, but you will still need the advice of this article to show you how you can best market your business through them.

Connect your blog to Linkedin by putting a share button at the top of the page. Because of its nature, Linkedin has users who are generally people with influence who have higher incomes, meaning plenty of potential customers with money to spend on your products and services. With more than 100 million people using Linkedin, it is a great opportunity using social media to market your business without spending a dime.

Create an open forum in which you allow customers to be part of your creative process. You will be surprised at how well your customer base can help you brainstorm an idea, create the "blueprint", and lay out the best implementation of the idea. When you have this kind of input coming from your customers, it is safe to assume they will buy when launched.

To make a social media based giveaway more interesting, come up with prizes that people can't buy on their own. Create a unique t-shirt, or offer tickets to a sold out event. When you're the only means people have of obtaining something, they'll be sure to enter your contest and encourage their friends to do so as well.

Use Facebook to get some very low cost marketing opportunities. Make a professional business account or create a business fan page. Take some time to look up your competitors on Facebook to see how much of a presence they have, and what they did to get that. Do not copy what they did, but use their page as an example for what is working or what is not.

If you are considering using a social media marketing consultant, make sure they are successful making connections on their social media sites. If the company you chose does not make connections with others and have others that seek to connect with them, it is very unlikely they will be able to assist you in doing so.

Learn the posting patterns on social sites. The peak traffic times for many of these sites are at 7 A.M., 5 P.M. and 10 P.M. and those are the times that you should be sure to post something new. If you post more than those three times, be sure that you are posting something unique and interesting, but limit the total number of times you post each day.

To make sure your social media communication comes across as authentic, find your own voice. People aren't interested in posts that sound like they were generated by a computer, but they are interested in seeing your personality. Talk to your followers as if you're sitting down with them to share a cup of coffee. It'll make them trust you and will make your posts more engaging.

Approaching social media marketing requires just that, "being social". That means on each platform you progress to, you will need to create a unique profile that best represents your business. Keeping in touch with certain people and establishing your own social identity is a driving factor in any profitable SMM campaign.

Remember that when you are using social media to market your business, you are communicating with people, not at them. The technology that people are using now and the way social media is designed is allowing your customers to communicate easier than ever before. You have to engage in this conversation and communicate with your customers in contrast to posting ad copy with a one-sided point of view.

When using social media marketing, you may have to adjust and refresh your objective and goals on a regular basis, so that you can stay on target. The conversations may take your marketing down unexpected paths, so it is best to re-evaluate the direction it is going on a regular basis and adjust accordingly.

Even if you've spent a great deal of time on social networking sites you may not have a clue about where to begin when it comes to using them for marketing. If you use the ideas that were suggested here, then you have a good running start on the process.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment