Social media marketing is one of the top priorities for businesses with an online presence in 2009, new research indicates.
A major benefit to this type of marketing is it costs nothing to join and this in comparison to other traditional and sometimes costly marketing techniques that can leave you paying out far more than you ever get in. What you are basically doing with social marketing is building on the back of your own network of contacts and clients and using that network to build your campaign.
The main social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube etc) are all free and are surprisingly simple to manage and maintain. Alongside these sits blogging and article writing. Things you can do with these networking opportunities include:
- Publicity – social media allows people to share things of interest with everyone thus increasing the visibility of your business and yourself
- Support – joining like minded groups will allow you to share areas of common interest, assisting and helping others whilst seeking support in areas you feel a bit of guidance is needed.
- Integrate – add social media into your other marketing arenas
Manage
Simplicity is the key and all of these sites can be surprisingly simple to manage and maintain. The truly great thing about social media is that it allows you to enter the fray with as large or as small a commitment as you feel is appropriate to you.
Another great thing about social media is that it has the potential to offer your business a whole new world of opportunities that are affordable, measurable and on an international scale.
What not to do
- Don’t just go on there to actively promote your business, people will rapidly lose interest in you as to them you ‘have little or no value’.
- Never leave a derogatory or negative comment in response to someone, if you don’t agree or dislike what someone may have said, sometimes it’s best just to ignore.
What to do
- Inject an element of fun, fear or controversy into your campaigns
- Offer something unique that you either know or suspect people will find interesting
- If you’re aiming at a younger audience, find out where your audience is and target them on their terms and in their language
- Aim to build an audience each and every time you start a new campaign. With social media you can hang onto some of those people and build up your own community, one that ideally intersects around the world.
The key to maintaining and building that community is a blog for your business, and here are some of the benefits:
- Higher search engine rankings – generally speaking, a regular stream of new articles is considered appealing by the search engines, who will pay more attention to your blog or website, ranking you more highly accordingly. The more pages you write, the more there is to be found. However, it’s an exercise in quality not quantity!
- Gaining trust – by writing informative and authoritative articles, over time you’ll build confidence, trust, respect and a sense of “expert status” around your business.
- A sense of community – you’re engaging with your customers in a conversational style that’s difficult to replicate by other means. And by allowing people to comment on your articles, you’re encouraging those people to participate, giving them a reason to return. In simple terms, a blog is a great opportunity for you to quickly share ideas
In Summary
Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic. Social media marketing is an excellent way to get people to come into your site to take a look at at what you have to offer. The actual overall process of this area of marketing is not difficult at all.
It is one of the most effective tools for boosting your online business and making a presence for it in the web world.
Social media marketing is one of the newest methods of marketing a web site and has evolved quickly into one of the most effective methods.