You may have noticed a lot of coverage over the past couple of years about the rapid growth of social networks and how they are changing the way we communicate?

Perhaps, you have also stumbled across one of the many articles professing how to ‘double your sales’ with Twitter or Facebook and maybe feel you have missed the boat with your own marketing?

But, it’s actually worth asking the question as to whether marketing through social media actually works in the first place, and, if it does, how can you make it work for your business?

The Changing Face Of The Web

Many social media web sites have been built on the back of a technical evolution on the Internet – something paraphrased as “Web 2.0”. It’s a term that many marketers talk about with great authority and it is used in many different contexts. But, what exactly is it?

In the early days of the Internet, a website contained words and pictures – like a magazine or brochure – and it wasn’t an interactive environment. But, with the advent of Blogging, Wikis and commenting (to name but a few) we can all get involved with conversations online by writing (and publishing) directly onto web pages.

We can easily create our own Facebook profiles, Blogs and Twitter accounts and share information with people who have similar interests. For this reason, Web 2.0 is often referred to as the read/write web.

Of course, one of the main reasons social networking has become mainstream so quickly is that many of the websites don’t charge – they are free to use.  Companies looking to raise their profile online have taken advantage of this to promote their profile to a whole new audience, often in an inappropriate way.

When it comes to marketing your business through social networks, are people even talking about your brand in the first place? Are they discussing your industry? If so, where are those conversations taking place so you can join in and raise your profile too?

Getting Specific

As with most marketing case studies, many of the success stories you will read about are consumer brands; brands that people want to talk about; brands with a mass market.

From this feedback, companies from all sorts of industries have picked up on the buzz and started Twittering, Blogging and setting up their Facebook fan groups, and, because the cost of entry is virtually zero, it’s not just the big boys. Startups and small businesses have also jumped on the bandwagon.

Move into the business-to-business space and getting your voice heard becomes somewhat harder than the success stories suggested it would be. Who wants to talk about widgets or your bespoke niche service, especially when so many other companies occupy the same space? It’s like exhibiting at a huge trade show with all your competitors setting up a stand right next to you.

Interestingly though, some people do want to talk about the same thing as you and may be interested in hearing what your company has to say. The key is to find out where the most appropriate conversation is taking place and to then to understand how that conversation is taking place.

Conversation Marketing

With Web 2.0 technology everybody can have a voice. So the way you engage with people through social media works very differently from traditional offline marketing. If you say the wrong thing in the wrong way, people have the right to reply and, in terms of reputation, they may have a lot less to lose than you and potentially a much larger audience listening to them. Treading carefully and mixing with the right people becomes even more important.

Business marketers in the social space often overlook rules of interaction and social etiquette. They try to sell too quickly and too aggressively without gaining trust, looking to control conversations and relationships. But let’s face it, who wants to stop around and listen to the person controlling the conversation in the real world? Why on earth would we put up with it any more online?

In fact, in the social space we can un-follow, de-friend and block at the click of a button; the relationship gone in a second, along with trust in your brand. It’s happening to a lot of marketers in the social space – no-one is listening to them because they have nothing that people want to hear.

Creating Trust

Creating a successful marketing strategy using social networks requires the ability (and patience) to develop trust with people. Like many marketing techniques, it’s a case of creating your pipeline of new relationships and developing them over a period of time – not pushing the sale from the outset.

Gaining initial trust is essential.

One trust-building strategy for social media marketing – whatever your industry – is to answer the questions that people want (or need) the answers to. If you can engage your audience with relevant information, they will not only buy into you, they will also spread the word – your word.

Platforms such as Blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to demonstrate your product and industry knowledge in an open forum. Of course, you can also create relevant links to your website through these platforms to drive traffic to your website and increase your brand profile – as long as you are subtle in your approach.

Developing Relationships

Then, as people begin to trust your social profile, you can begin to drive them through to the next step in developing the relationship. For instance, why not ask them to subscribe to your e-mail marketing?

This overcomes audience apathy. If you have developed enough trust in your social relationship, leverage it to a medium whereby the onus is not on your audience to collect the message, rather on you to send a relevant and regular message – the next step in developing further trust, and one step closer to delivering a customer to your sales team.

But beware. As in any personal relationship, trust can be lost in an instant if you say the wrong thing. Keeping one eye on the end game and never abusing the relationship is an absolute must.

Where Do You Start?

Having a strategy for your social profile is often overlooked but is essential to give you focus with your approach. Questioning your objectives is essential:

Should your profile be you (as a person), your CEO, or your company? Who will gain the most trust and credibility online? Which social platform is the most appropriate to focus on? Where are your existing customers? Why not ask them how they use social media? What are you going to talk about? What do you want to be recognized (and found) for? By sticking to a subject (however niche), you can become an acknowledged expert. How much personality should come through? Is it yours, or your company tone-of-voice?

Setting up a profile in any of the social networks is a straightforward process and often free. It pays to explore the media to see if the audience is right for your business and be prepared to switch off your efforts if they do not yield any results.

Summary

There is no doubt that engaging people on the right social media platform can help you reach a new audience and increase your online profile.

The challenge is to create a focused strategy aimed towards a specific audience and engage them in a conversational dialogue to encourage trust.

Only when you have gained trust can you leverage the relationship and lead the conversation to the next level. Where many marketers want quick wins, social media is much more of an effective marketing medium if you are not pushing too hard. So, you may have to be prepared to wait until trust has developed.

That said, when your pipeline begins to fulfill itself, social media offers a very sustainable route to generate awareness and, ultimately, potential new sales leads.

You know how important social media optimization is but, admittedly, it can be a daunting task trying to keep up with it all. So I thought I’d give you seven simple social media marketing tips you can do regularly to help build your social media network.

1. Contacts. Add 5 new contacts on Facebook or LinkedIn each week. This should take you less than an hour. Fortunately, Facebook and LinkedIn make this easy for you by recommending friends with similar interests. Or you can simply visit the pages of your other Facebook friends and find new friends there to invite. When you send an invitation, include a personal message, such as, “Hi, we are both friends with Jim Miller and have some similar interests and hope you will accept my invitation.”

2. Forum posting. Concentrate on one active forum in your niche and build up your profile and make 3-5 posts per week. Use the PM (Private Message) feature to communicate with other members behind the scenes. But don’t sell to them!

3. Prune your RSS Feeds. Go through your feed reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc.) and ruthlessly prune. You’ll find that you don’t read all the blogs you have subscribed to and you should eliminate this clutter so that you aren’t as distracted from your work. Make a list of the top 5 blogs in your niche and read those posts every day and leave at least one comment per week on those five blogs.

4. Yahoo Answers. This isn’t effective for all niches because Yahoo Answers readers tend to be young, but answer 5 Yahoo Answers questions per day in your niche, if appropriate. You’ll quickly notice that most of the people who answer questions aren’t very articulate or don’t provide quality information, so it will be easy for your answers to stand out and get selected as the best answer.

5. Digg away. Spend 15 minutes on Digg each day and try to befriend some of the top Diggers there. Instant message is the best way to keep in touch with them and they usually post that info on their profiles.

6. Focus, focus, focus. Just because there’s a lot of hype about a particular social media site doesn’t mean you should devote time to it. Focus only one the sites that will help you grow your business and don’t get caught up in drama and hype.

7. Be on alert. Check your Google Alerts for your name once a day. If someone has mentioned you in a blog or other website, go and leave a comment or respond in some way.

By following this tips, you should be able to use social media more efficiently and see your business grow as a result.

Make Money Online

Social Media Marketing is marketing through social media networks and online communities. Social Media networks generally attract a lot of users. They are online platforms where users share thoughts, discuss ideas and interact with each other on a variety of subjects. Social Media is a meeting of minds where everything is user-generated. The user gains prominence in a social media network. His ideas, thoughts and opinions gain utmost value and importance. Social Media is the easiest route to reach the customers.

Social Media Marketing is a type of internet marketing which leads to achieve branding and marketing goals through participation in various social media networks such as Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Hi5 etc. Social Media includes websites where news, photos and videos are user-generated. Many innovative and interesting social media networks mushroom in the online world everyday. Sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Furl, Reddit, Del.ici.ous and others are social bookmarking sites where users bookmark their favorite web pages and share with others information about web pages which they find interesting or useful. All these websites include certain mechanisms to allow users to vote for the content submitted by the other users. Through this, a particular content’s popularity is gauged.

On the other hand, Social Media Marketing is also a vibrant marketing strategy for marketing your site. You can manage the creation and distribution of content through the social media easily and effectively. Social Media is the latest kind of viral marketing. Messages sent through social media reach customers quickly. There is also no fear of the message being twisted or misinterpreted in the process. Moreover, in Social Media Marketing, you can expect a great inflow of comments/critiques and reactions for your marketing messages. In a way, all these will help you know the expectations of your customers. It is indeed a step in gauging customer psychometrics.

Social Media Marketing is the most popular upcoming marketing concept of the dotcom world. There are various marketing techniques which are very closely related to social media marketing, such as Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, and Social Media Optimization. Social media sites provide a huge variety of subjects, topics, and discussions to choose from. A social media web site can be defined as a common ground, where individuals gather together to share their views and opinions. Social media has also adapted various mediums such as audio, video, and textual mediums. There are few guidelines in order to successfully implement social media marketing. Improve the ability of your website, so that it can be linked to other sites easily. All the incoming links are unique, so treat them properly by providing dedicated space for them.

In order to be successful at social media, the following steps can also be very useful. First, create forums on your own web site. Provide interesting topics so that people would like to participate and interact with each other through your site. Keep updating information and news to attract your visitors. Compose podcasts and use the clips to promote your products.

Social Media Marketing gives exposure for your site in a larger site or amidst a larger group of people. Use the social media in the best way possible and gain results.

Caffeinated Content – Members-Only Content for WordPress

The majority of online businesses these days have to use social networking sites to help drive traffic constantly to their websites or blogs. Searching for the top social networking sites is probably the best place to start.

It has almost become compulsory to network this way and any online business that chooses not to take full advantage of it will be left behind.

The traditional methods of marketing are struggling to keep up with the rapidly changing Internet world of today. We purely adjust our lives to fit into this marvel and not the other way around.

I can tell you that there is probably not a person now that uses the internet on a regular basis who won’t know what a social networking site is. How many times have you met a person and then end up asking them if they are on Facebook or Twitter?

In fact, I can promise you that they can probably list all the top social networking sites without pondering about it for too long.

I sat outside a coffee shop one morning in the city and I found myself listening to people’s conversations as they walked by. I started to calculate how many times similar conversations will come up from different people and I discovered the following:

Six out of ten conversations were related to a social networking site. Groups especially on these sites, are so powerful that it can influence anyone’s opinion in a heart beat.

So if the majority of people almost re-arrange their lives to fit into this social world, why not excessively use it to drive traffic to your website? The essential part is targeting the right audience for your business. I mention in my e-book about how powerful it can be if used in the correct manner and with great execution.

Most of these sites are free to use and that is a huge asset to your business.So driving the right kind of people to your website through these social networking sites can be daunting and a massive struggle occasionally.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. It takes time and effort to build up a reputation (Many people will not undertake such a task)

2. Due to not having patience and persistence, people burn their chances by rushing to generate results.

Social networking sites need to be treated very delicately if you want to drive traffic to your website on a consistent basis. Interfere with the wrong crowd and you will quickly be blacklisted amongst the users. Use it wisely and it will be your pot of gold that never gets depleted.

So the choice we make of where and when to network is of the essence here. Begin with that mind set and you will prosper from this contrivance of the social world.

social networking

Interest in using social media to help business has skyrocketed. It seems that everyone wants to be popular and have the most fans and biggest following. It is assumed by many that more followers equal more value. This has resulted in some unorthodox schemes designed to grab the user’s attention. While it is true that this could mean that more people want to share the information you post, it has very little correlation with an increase in overall interest in what you have to say. The value of social media is in its connection with other uses.

Building relationships should be the focus, rather than a media blitz designed to create a stir. When crafting your Internet marketing strategy, it is important to set realistic expectations. Managing your goals and following through when using social media to help business, will generate a loyal, quality following. In the long run, these are the users that will positively affect your top line and increase revenue. Social media marketing can be frustrating, especially when you are just starting out. Once you have completed a post, you can’t take it back. It’s out there for everyone to read, comment on and share. This makes it important to control your emotions.

Don’t post when you are frustrated, upset or feeling desperate. This will prevent you from making a bad decision that can detract from all of the good you have done. Using social media to help business is all about being making connections. Relationships are built over time. Education and communication are often among the goals of successful social media marketers. This can be time consuming, and it does not happen overnight. Don’t get drawn in by the push to see bigger results faster. This will only cause you to lose sight of your goals. Creating a consistent message and personality when using social media to help business is key.

Sharing experiences is part of building relationships, but think before you type. There are some things that just should not be shared. When in doubt, don’t. If the situation shared makes people uncomfortable, it can transfer to your brand. You will lose followers and potentially lose customers. When setting goals, be realistic. When using social media marketing to help business, focus on the reason you started blogging or posting in the first place. The more you post, the more feedback you will get. This helps you effectively tailor your campaigns to match the customer need. In the end, it translates to an enhanced online marketing campaign that captures market share and earns respect.

WordPress

Social Media is a wonderful place to connect with people, have conversations, establish your credibility in your market, build your community online and eventually convert those connections into clients and customers. Increasing your visibility online is one of the many benefits to a Social Media Marketing Plan and here are 3 tools that will help increase your visibility so you eventually reach more eyes.

Tool #1 Keyword Research – Keywords are simply the words people type into the search box of Google when they are looking for a product or service online. They can be either single words or more often a 3-4 word phrases. If you know the words people are searching for and use them in your copy then more people will come to your site.

Internet marketers have know about the importance of Keyword research for years but it is just now becoming popular for other people who want to market themselves online to do keyword research. It can be learned and there are many free and paid tools but let me warn you it can be somewhat boring and on the other hand it is somewhat of an art.

Whichever you chose, take the time to learn how to do it (there are many videos on You Tube) or pay someone to do it for you and then keep the words in a list near your computer to remind you when you write any copy

Tool #2 EzineArticles – Social Media is driven by content so content creation is one of the most important tasks you can do to market yourself. EzineArticles is the perfect solution because you can write an article and then re purpose it across all the other sites. Each article can be made into many blog posts, Tweets, a Facebook status change and update on LinkedIn and on and on.

Tool #3 Hootsuite – One of the biggest complaints I hear about Social Media is it takes too much time and that’s why this is my number one tool for efficiency. Hootsuite allows you to update your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and soon yourself hosted WordPress Blog all from one spot!

You can add as many profiles as you want so you can send messages from as many accounts as you wish. You still need to spend time on the other social networks to see the other conversations but it sure helps on those days when you only have a few minutes to spare.

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