Social Media Marketing

By Gerry Promos

For large companies, social media marketing can be a labor intensive, complicated, and non-standardized task where efficiency can be elusive. Many ad agencies and social media agencies are still trying to understand how to effectively market to the masses and are making it up as they go. So be careful where you spend your money and make sure you are getting measurable results from your marketing campaign.

Take the time to respond to the feedback from your customers. If you are interested in building a successful business, your customers have valuable information to share. The problem most companies have is that they are all ears and no response. When customers know you are responding to their needs via their feedback, they will want to continue doing business.

Find out where your customers are getting their social fix. You can leave yourself twisting in the wind if you start a social media campaign that reaches none of your target audience. You need to know if your customer base will be reading blogs, are tweeters or perhaps, they Facebook often. Research is the key to maximizing your efforts.

Develop quality content targeted for social media. If you are just haphazardly flinging words, advertising or any number of mundane snippets at your customers, then you are wasting your time and losing their business. Be as concerned about your social content offerings as you are for the content on your business site.

Make sure all of your posts and articles have a Facebook button at the top. This button makes it easy for your readers to share your content on Facebook. Most people will not wish to share your content on Facebook if they have to go through copying and pasting a link.

Establish your goal for a social media campaign. If you do not know what you hope to achieve with your campaign, you won't know when you have been successful. Are you looking for product awareness, concrete sales, or better customer service? When you can answer these questions, building a strategy is an easier step.

Understand the concept of conversation. What many companies forget is that once a customer gives feedback they are opening the door for conversation. Take your responses to the next level by opening a dialogue with your customers. Be passionate about learning what their needs are and allow this to energize your next big move or spur creative ideas to make your company better.

If you are considering social media marketing, the first thing you should do is sign up with as many social media websites as possible with your preferred account names. These account names should include your business names. This is particularly important for websites like Twitter where your account name is your displayed name. As time goes on, it will become more and more difficult for you to get the account name that you want. Reserve those names now.

Always remember who your audience is in your social media marketing campaigns and what matters the most to them. You need to post content that is applicable to them and focus your efforts in ways that keep their attention. Your posts should be relevant and of high quality that your followers and fans do not just skip them over because they are not interested.

To help your customers help you spread your content, make sure blog posts have the right buttons to get easily shared. You can add Facebook Like and Share buttons, as well as Linked share ability and the Retweet button for Twitter users. When you have engaging content your regular followers like, they will spread it around the internet, hopefully drawing more followers to you.

About the Author:

Gerry Promos has been in the field of how to make money blogging for a long time and maintains a website about how to make money on the internet where you can get answers to the rest of your questions.