Like all things, it’s how you do something that makes or breaks you. This applies especially to social media marketing. This somewhat new approach to using the web to reach an audience, grow that audience and convert them to sales, calls for knowledge, finesse, and strategy. It’s like doing a dance. You just don’t want to do things a-b-c like a robot, you want to cover the fundamentals of successful procedures but add your own special touch that makes you unique.
The first thing you need to do is know which social media site calls for and follow their terms of service to the letter. Never make an enemy of a social media site. It could end your online presence and harshly at that. Once you know the rules and then the ‘how-to’s’ to use the site, you’ll be off to a solid foundation. Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet you need to see how the pros use social media marketing. Watch out for those ‘gurus’ who promise the sun, moon, and stars with courses and seminars on how to make a gillion dollars with social media marketing. They’re all generally nonesense and are only making money selling old and ineffective techniques and strategies and unfortunately illegal ‘Black Hat’ techniques that will get you banned. There are many approaches to using these sites and just perusing and studying how the effective marketers use them will give you a good general idea of what you can do. From there you experiment and that’s where another major important step comes into play.
Engagement.
Once you’ve got your foot in the door of the big sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +, you have to engage with the audiences to draw attention to your self and build up your own audience. This can take some time but if you have exclusive content that is also proprietary, you can call your own shots. For example, if you’re participating on a Facebook page that focuses on kittens, and you have a pet store, you’re way up the ladder in personal and professional authority. You comment on other people’s posts and add significant responses that helps them along. People will remember you as the ‘go to’ person and comment on your posts and share and like them. Now that you’ve got their attention you can post original content like stories and articles, photos and videos via your YouTube site. This will cement you as a sound voice in your niche and increase your page rank and backlinks.
Now that you’ve become a presence of note, you’ve got to keep the action going. You need to keep doing all the successful things and then always keep analyzing your statistics. Statistics allow for monitoring what is successful on your site, especially where the traffic is coming from. With that data you can fine tune things for better efficiency.
Be careful of other marketers trying to sell you short cuts. If these techniques really worked they wouldn’t even tell you about them. Read between the lines from the professional articles in the field and if you need help, hire a highly recommended professional in social media marketing.
Remember, precision and realistic goals are at play here. Don’t take wild chances and study, study, study, apply, apply, apply. You’ll see results that you can rest your head on.
Image credit: IB Systems graphic development