Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is the use of websites and tools such as Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to make connections, communicate and create relationships with potential clients from all over the world. These sites are a two way media which allows back and forth communication between yourself and your potential clients and business contacts.

Why use Social Media marketing? In the current economic climate business needs to be innovative to reduce costs and maintain profits in difficult economic times. Your business must adapt and find creative ways to use new technologies. Many of the social media strategies are free or low cost and all you need is the time to get involved. A website used to be enough but now the web is rapidly changing and you need to move with that change. Work on a successful web presence with several other areas on the web where you are active and on the move.

1. What are you trying to achieve?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. Where are they active online?
4. Do you have the time to engage in social media?
5. How will you measure results?

You must have a strategy. Take the time to research, learn about and carefully select the social networks that will work for your business.

Here are some ideas to get you started.

Facebook – is the fastest growing social network in the world with 400 million active users which offer market friendly functionality that works for small business. You do not need to set up a personal profile to create a Facebook Page however if you already have a personal profile you can easily set up your Facebook Business Page or Facebook Group and update regularly with new information, events, photos, notes and videos to keep it fresh.

If you are concerned about security/privacy on social networking sites then only put information on the site that you would tell any potential client. Social Networking sites don’t have to violate privacy if you set them up correctly.

Setting up a Facebook Page without a personal profile.

Here is a great tutorial by Nick O'Neill covering many areas of Facebook privacy:

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

Writing a Blog – is it right for you? Ask yourself: Do you have the resources and news to post content 3-5 times per week? Do you have interesting information to share and are there people out that are interested enough in what you have to say to comment and interact with you? You can set up a free blog with WordPress.

Twitter – Free social networking/micro blogging service. Text based posts limited to 140 characters. Use to share news, special offers and events, announce new products and help people in need. An excellent tool to monitor your brand and reputation.

LinkedIn – a large network of business professionals. Helps you to find clients, help and deals, build a buzz about your business, hire professionals, and get feedback for research.

It is important to take the time to listen to what others are saying about your business and industry online and participate in these conversations as a means to stay informed, increase exposure, share information and make changes to your business practices and service.

Ways to listen are:

Google Alerts – a service offered by Google where you choose the term and Google lets you know via email where that term is being used on the internet.

Technorati – online directory that indexes and searches blogs

RSS Feed – Set up a RSS feed to monitor blogs that are talking about your industry.