Social Media Marketing Tips
I attended a presentation today by Clara Shih from Salesforce.com. Clara has a book coming out called The Facebook Era about how businesses are networking, marketing and selling more stuff through social networking apps. We do a fair amount of social media marketing here at VerticalResponse and we definitely believe in it’s value for small business. While it’s not a replacement for other online marketing programs, it does augment those programs virally at little to no cost.
Social marketing is more the responsibility of the employees today, than the employer. Why? Because any company or business owner can set up a Group, Page, or Cause on Facebook and invite current customers to become fans or members, but it’s the employees (or friends of the company) that already have the established social networks online. Without a few individuals taking the time to create posts, add links, and invite their friends to become fans too it will become a stale community. Leverage is the key to driving adoption.
3 Easy Steps to Social Media Marketing:
1) Create a Company Page or persona, like Jack Box on MySpace that is fun and interactive. Get your employees or friends to dedicate a minute or two a day to help get things going, update their own Facebook status’ mentioning your brand, Twitter about the page or something new they posted, include a link in your email newsletters to increase traffic and membership.
2) Search Twitter for your company’s industry or topics that relate to your business and start to follow a few other industry experts. Your own list of followers will quickly grow. As it grows, keep twittering about industry news, press you received, or even that you’ve just completed your latest email newsletter (this is a little list building tip). Add links to every tweet to drive them to your site, group, blog, or opt-in form.
3) Measure your success. After all, if you can’t measure it, why are you doing it?
Use tools like:
- Facebook Lexicon to see the frequency of your topic’s being mentioned.
- TweetDeck to review all the twitter feeds and break them down into manageable views.
- Andiamo Systems- (our choice at VerticalResponse) to manage all of your social media activity. We track not only our own online “buzz” but our competitors’ to compare.
Remember social media networking is just another way to keep your business top of mind with customers and prospects. You are bringing your message to a highly targeted audience online.
February 19th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
there are more social media networks that you can use in marketing besides myspace and facebook.. Just get the most out of those social networking sites and i think with your 3 easy steps social media marketing will work out and it will be great.
February 20th, 2009 at 6:07 am
Just joined, already on twitter, will join myspace and all the others now
February 20th, 2009 at 7:36 am
Twitter seems to be a big contender. Not only can you see what is happening in your geographical and business neck of the woods, but get your name or product out to a large audience.
February 20th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
We can’t forget LinkedIn and the importance of maintaining your online presence through other marketing vehicles like blogs.
February 21st, 2009 at 5:28 am
[...] Social Media Marketing Tips: Erin Jacobs talks in 3 short points how to deploy your social media marketing campaign, step by step.Pithy and very useful. [...]
February 24th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
I also attended the webinar, and found it to be very inspirational! It’s great advice for free advertising and can help get the word out for many small business owners. You can find us on Yelp, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, and of course check out my contestant profile on Start-up nation!
Miyoko
Indulge Party
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I highly recommend the book Groundswell. It features Salesforce as well as dozens of other companies that use various web 2.0 strategies that are really inspiring! It may sound hokey but TwitterMoms is a really good site. They have a huge business focus and have over 12,000 members. It is a great way to promote your business.
October 31st, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Social Media Marketing is really the trend these days. i market most of my products through social networking sites.
November 16th, 2009 at 6:28 am
i do Social Media Marketing specially when promoting a new website or an affiliate product. Social media is more effective than offline advertising in my opinion.
January 14th, 2011 at 11:58 pm
It’s also important to see how many people your social media pages are sending to your website — Google analytics is great for that. We also keep an eye on how many pages they view and how long they spend on the site, which is a good indication of whether they find our content interesting and relevant.
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