More and more people nowadays are diving headlong into the world of social marketing. If you do social media marketing the right way, you have to spend the time and energy on it. That being said, there are a few simple things that you need to learn in order to get started in social media marketing.
Your goal should be to initiate a conversation with your customers. What many companies fail to recognize, is that feedback, even negative, is giving them the opening to have a conversation. Start a conversation with your customers who leave feedback in order to develop your relationship with them. Be open and willing to listen, and this will help make your company more successful.
Add a special box to your blog to give visitors access to the Facebook “like” function. This allows people to “like” you on Facebook. People will be more than likely to like your page if there is a section on your site where they can do it, as opposed to having to go to your profile directly and doing it. This makes it easy and more likely that your visitors will do this and you will see more traffic because of ity.
Experiment with social media, in other words, just pretend until you are a success. Copy a competitor’s strategy until you can create an original plan that works for your business. Find their social profiles and analyze the content they post and the specials they run.
If you want customers to respond to social media marketing, running specials that are exclusive if they follow you on those sites is a good way to accomplish that. If they are seeing deals in their Facebook feed they cannot get anywhere else, they are more likely to pay attention to your marketing and even spread word-of-mouth advertising for you online for free.
Don’t simply push products blindly upon any reader that happens to scan through your blogs. Try posting links or stories from outside providers that are relative to your niche or industry. You can run contests, post pictures and ask questions. Provide compelling and interactive content. Rather than looking for areas to place your products cleverly, you should think of how to generate interest in your products through content. Unless your business competes solely on price, be certain you also focus on other attributes of your product or service that illustrate the value of your product or service in a consumer’s life.
Always give your site visitors a way to subscribe to you so they may follow you on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Most people use social media sites on a daily basis, so giving them quick access via Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter is a great way to make sure they have instant access when you put up a new post.
Put up new tweets as often as you can so that your subscribers don’t forget about you. Twitter is concerned with volume, so you have to post a lot. Use Twitter’s character limits to your advantage, and split one event or update into several small updates.
Using LinkedIn with your social media marketing strategy is always a smart move. In fact, you can link your pages directly together using a blog app. Therefore, every time you create an article, it will help you gain double exposure. That saves you time and exposure for your products increased by blogging for site visitors and LinkedIn contacts at once.
While social networks have certainly changed communication habits, maintaining a professional persona is important. You can get to know someone personally, but make sure to maintain a professional demeanor. Avoid getting into disagreements; if you encounter comments or posts that are not constructive, you can just delete them. Make a separate personal account to trade cat pictures with friends and family.
These tips make no attempt to be comprehensive, but they do cover some common pitfalls that every social media marketer eventually runs up against. There is always something new to learn about social media since it is a constantly changing area, and it is important you always stay up on the latest trends. Apply what you’ve learned here to glean more followers and enhance your business.
