Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has taken the business world by storm, and it's no wonder. When you consider that you can create and manage an effective social media marketing campaign to grow your business for very little money compared to traditional advertising and that you can deliver your message around the world in a matter of seconds, every small business owner should at least consider adding social media to their marketing mix.

Admittedly, social media marketing isn't a fit for every single type of business out there. But the potential payoff warrants a detailed look and not a hasty decision when you're trying to determine of social media is a good fit for you.

Here are 12 points to keep in mind in deciding if social media marketing may be right for your small business:

1. Social media doesn’t create buzz, it uncovers it.
2. To be successful with social media marketing, you need to hang out where your customers and prospects hang out and listen to what they are saying about you and your competition. However, you also need to know when to join the conversation and when not to butt in.
3. Social media marketing is not a short-term fix but it can be a very effective long-term strategy for any size business to listen to and engage with customers and prospects.
4. You need to know why you're marketing through social media. There are 3 primary reasons for doing so: Building awareness; Building sales; or building loyalty.
5. Social media marketing requires a clearly-defined strategy that incorporates goals and objectives, along with an idea of how you'll measure success.
6. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn users take advantage of search tools within those communities, using keyword phrases to find what they're looking for. Therefore, like all forms of online marketing, in order to get found through social media marketing, you'll want to first do some keyword research and then optimize your social media profiles for the keyword phrases you've decided to target.
7. Social media marketing and search engine marketing go hand in hand. Because your social media efforts help strengthen your SEO efforts (rankings and traffic) and vice-versa, in today's competitive marketplace you should strongly consider engaging in both activities.
8. Using a blog as your home base and Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn (and other outlets where you customers and prospects are likely to hang out) as feeders to drive traffic back to your blog is a proven social media marketing strategy that can provide great results.
9. Visitors are much more likely to share content from a blog than from a website, as website content is more typically geared to sales and blog content is more newsworthy. Therefore, using your blog URL in your social media profiles is often a better strategy than a link to your website's home page.
10. Don't oversell on any of the social media outlets. Those who frequent social media channels frown on being constantly solicited and may view attempts to do so as spam. The result is that people will stop following you and may even report you as a spammer. Therefore, you should promote content other than your own far more frequently when engaging with your social media followers (some suggest a ration of as high as 12:1).
11. Your content is the driver for social media marketing, so if you're going to promote your own content you need to go the extra mile to see to it that the content is worth sharing. Mix up your content to provide variety and make it easy to share, such as adding buttons and links for visitors to use to email, tweet or share your content and connect with you on all the social sites to which you belong.
12. Facebook advertising delivers your ads to the most targeted market your money can buy. LinkedIn is where you need to be if you want to reach decision makers. While Facebook is considered generally more effective for B2C businesses than B2B businesses, keep in mind that even if you operate a B2B business, those B2C businesses that are on Facebook may very well be looking for the products or services you have to offer.

While social media is constantly changing, it’s not a fad and it’s not going to go away any time soon. The sheer number of people who actively use social media outlets, especially Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube and the zero cost of entry are very strong arguments for considering social media marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy. And while the popularity of individual social media outlets may rise and fall, and new outlets may come on the scene, the overall concepts and value of social media marketing are here to stay.