Social Media Marketing is one of the latest online promotional techniques and is quickly growing in popularity as a way to gain a competitive edge. It involves creating content and publishing it via blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg, Twitter, YouTube and many more.
Social networking websites provide easy to use tools that make it simple to get set up and immediately 'join in'. To be done well, however, social media marketing is like any other promotional campaign, it must have an objective and a strategy to achieve your desired results. Here are some ideas for planning to stand out from the (ever increasing) social networking crowd.
Social Media Marketing for Business
Social media marketing is about enabling interaction as sustained interaction creates relationships, which in turn opens up the opportunities to share information about products and services.
A well thought out, sustainable social media marketing strategy can fulfil many objectives and benefit a business in the following ways:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Providing customer research opportunities
- Opening up an additional direct marketing channel
- Improving public relations and customer service
- Helping strengthen a Search Engine Optimisation campaign
While temporary success may be gained by simply 'getting stuck in', the best way social media marketing will help grow your business is if it becomes part of your overall marketing plan.
Establish Your Objectives
Before venturing unprepared into the social media scene, take some time to consider what you hope to achieve – and how you might measure how effective your efforts will be over time.
Keeping your objectives in mind as you proceed will enable you to be more focussed and prevent getting unnecessarily sidetracked. This easily by-passed step can help convert social media marketing efforts from simply being time consuming to being time well spent.
Listen & Understand
Spend some time finding and monitoring what activity is already taking place amongst your intended audience. If you identify where your customers 'hang out' and understand their community, you will be able to interact with them more effectively from day one.
Choose Your Tools & Engage
Now a good foundation has been set, the next step is to 'join the conversation'. Some of the most popular social media marketing activities for business include:
- Publishing a business blog – as an appendage to your corporate website
- Microblogging, via social networking sites such as Twitter and FriendFeed
- Participating on social media networks, such as Facebook, Linkedin and more
- Running ad campaigns on social networking sites
- Monitoring social media sites in order to follow and participate in the 'conversation'.
While it may be tempting to have a presence in all the available channels (it is free to set up after all), be realistic with your available resources.
Be prepared to share your expertise without asking for anything in return – focusing your efforts on being genuinely helpful is a great way to engage your audience and is a sure way to increase your reputation and social media influence.
Monitor Your Progress and Make Improvements
Participation in social media is not always convenient or directly beneficial, so measuring the activity created by your social networking efforts is key to identifying your progress – and vital for identifying where to focus future resources.
If you would like help creating a workable social media marketing plan for your business, contact us today.
