What is social media marketing and how do I do it?

This term is no longer a catch phrase in business circles around the world, it’s a known and accepted form of proven marketing. a

Way back in the good old days the term ‘social marketing’ meant getting together at breakfast or lunch meetings and getting to know one another a little better whilst discussing the latest business matters. It meant hanging out with the clients at Friday lunches that went on until evening and then, if you were getting along, extended into Friday night and a really good ‘all fall down’ session followed by a round of golf at lunch time on the Saturday. (yes, I was in advertising in the eighties!)

Now it means spending hours online finding new and old contacts and encouraging them to ‘connect’ by entertaining or informing them with tweets, on your Facebook profile and backing up your website with a blog which you need to update at least three times a week and enhance with RSS feeds and embedded video from YouTube. And that’s without writing for the necessary article campaign that must thread it all together.

No wonder people are reluctant to embark on this route. Yet you have to ask yourself what all the hype is about.

Social media marketing is using the best of the web and online tools to harness the power of the wave of information flowing throughout the virtual world from one business owner or person to millions every day. In a nutshell it’s like walking into your own private arena and performing for thousands and sometimes, millions, of people all over the globe. Would you really want to miss out on that opportunity? Tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, forums, blogs, article distribution sites and ezines are all one element of the overall, interwoven fabric of social media networking and marketing online. Who ever you are you need to understand it and use it to your best ability or be left behind in the stampede.

Like many other people in business for over fifteen years I have always been a little behind the times in terms of technology and still have to ask my twelve year old for help with the DVD player and my ipod downloads but the applications used in social media practise are really easy to use. I’d encourage everyone in business (or not) to get to grips with some of the basic tools like Facebook and Twitter and have some fun starting and maintaining a blog about your niche.

Imagine that you are the hub, the business, product and brand. You probably have a website that you hope will bring you business and contacts. Your website designer has told you that it is search engine optimised (SEO) – lovely phrase that – and you just need to support it with a bit of print advertising or PR. Wrong!

Your website may bring you business eventually but you need to take it to market yourself. Here’s how:

Start a blog. Use Blogger or WordPress and simply follow the instructions, have fun with it, make it personal and interesting. It’s not your website. It’s about what you do from your own perspective. Research other people’s blogs and learn from them. If you don’t have time to populate your blog you can find content that you want to share or that is in the public domain and build your blog niche around that instead. A blog is like a diary, the more you write in it, the more interesting it becomes.
Register with Twitter: Tweet a few times a day about your blog or your product (which is yourself) and even about what you’re up to and put your blog address/website URL in each tweet. You can use Twitter to direct people following you to places where you want them to go. Start following people who interest you ie: those in a similar niche, those in your area (however you decide your audience) You’ll find that many of them follow you back and you can start engaging them in conversations in real time on Twitter and build relationships that matter.
Articles: Write a few articles and post them on ezines. Make them about you (the brand). If you can’t write, get a content writer to post them for you.  Articles are best written in series so choose a topic you are really comfortable with. You may want to learn a bit about seo before launching an article campaign as article distribution is a great way to increase your website rankings.
Networking Groups: Join networking groups on line like ‘Where2meet’ and ‘LinkedIn’ and get talking on their forums and using their meeting spots and live chat. In addition to that it’s also good practise to join live networking groups like 4Networking, the local Chamber of Commerce, BizLinx and any others near you and meet people face to face to enhance what you are doing online.
Keeping a database: Add every person you meet to your contact address book online and use this data to find contacts on social media tools like Twitter and LinkedIn and stay in touch with them on a regular basis.

There are many more tools and applications that make social media marketing extremely viable for business use but making all this work together at once takes dedication and patience but you’ll soon see the results as you keep track of your blog stats and website site visits. If you don’t have time or aren’t sure about how to make it work for you speak to a good social media consultant and they’ll help you decide on a strategy and action that is viable for you to execute and also help set it up for you and offer some training.

Soon you’ll be ahead of the game.