Using Social Media In Your Marketing Strategy

Social media can be a great marketing tool for your internet business if used correctly to build a following of people who know and trust you as well as a way for you to engage your followers. This is actually something I have only recently realized and started to learn myself. Up until a few months ago I had always written social media marketing off as a fad and a waste of time. But I started testing it out a bit more and little by little it grew on me until I finally found that it does have several benefits and can be a great addition to other internet marketing strategies. I still don’t have a huge following or a bunch of friends on any one social site but I am working to build them up right now.

Social networking and social bookmarking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Mixx, FriendFeed, and a bunch of others give you the opportunity to interact with an incredible amount of people that can be a huge potential market for your business. Plus, they are all free and easy to use. Not to mention the fact that they are very popular and used by just about everyone nowadays.

The most important part of social media marketing is to NOT treat it solely as an internet marketing tool. You must build a following, build trust, build relationships, interact with your friends/followers, give more than you take, and become someone they listen to and recommend to others. Then, you will be able to promote things to them every so often. Create value first and market later.

Too many people use whatever means possible to try and get as many followers/friends as they can so they can blast out links to their sites/offers and hope someone clicks them. That doesn’t work. It’s called “social” media or social “networking” for a reason! You must be social and truly network with others for this marketing strategy to work.

Marketing on social networks can be a very difficult path to take, but it can be very rewarding in the end if you do it correctly. You definitely shouldn’t tweet more than one marketing message per day on your main Twitter account or post more than one per day on your Facebook profile, or whatever other social networking site you use.

Social bookmarking sites are a little different because it is expected that you will “bookmark” links on them. However, you should still build up friendships and followings on them wherever possible so they will help you to vote up your content. And you should definitely not only post your own content to them. Bookmarking links to your own sites should be done sparingly or you won’t get far with the majority of users. Also, social bookmarking sites such as Delicious are typically much better to use than Twitter or Facebook for getting backlinks to your site.

The basis of social media marketing is to create value for your friends and followers on your social networks — give them an incentive of useful information, tips, giveaways, help, support, friendship, and general entertainment value in order to secure their trust and keep them as followers to which you can market (lightly) to in the future. This is one internet marketing strategy that must be handled with care and can’t be abused at all, or it won’t help you a bit.

Posted in Social Networking

Three Great Ways to Promote Your Facebook Page

Not long ago Facebook was only for college students to share pictures and keep in touch with each other, and was untapped as an internet marketing business resource. Now it is open to everyone and has become a very popular place to market businesses and products in a social networking environment on the internet. People can publicly support a cause, product, or business by “Liking” their Page on Facebook. The more people you expose it to the more “likes” you will get so it benefits you to promote your FB page.

One thing that you need to remember when it comes to marketing on Facebook is that it is a public and social website. When someone likes a page on there it becomes public knowledge that they like that page and all their friends can see it. Therefore, some businesses, products, or services may not be appropriate for Facebook marketing.

I am sure you already know there are many potential benefits of having your business on Facebook, but you may not know how to promote your page for maximum exposure. So below I have outlined three of the best ways to promote your Facebook business page.

1) Hold a Contest – This is one of the best ways to gain fans on your Facebook page. You can hold a contest for almost anything and give people various ways to enter the contest (one of them would obviously be to become your FB fan) then hold a random drawing of fans who will get a prize. You can spend a lot of money on it out of your own pocket or get money/prize donations to give away. You could also give away some of your own products or something else as the prizes.

2) Give an Incentive – Sometimes just giving people an incentive to join your Facebook fan page is enough. For example, you could give people a free gift or product discount for becoming your fan or give away free information and resources only to your fans. Even though all people have to do is click a little “like” button to become your fan it often takes an incentive to get them to do that simple task.

3) Link to It – Linking to your Facebook page from your blog, website, emails, other social sites, and everywhere else you possibly can is a great way to get more exposure for it. You should quickly see your fan count increase if you do this.

Combine all the resources you have available to you in order to get more Facebook fans and you will start to see your efforts pay off. Using FB as one of your internet marketing strategies can be very powerful if done correctly and consistently, so don’t overlook it.

By the way, I recently started a new Facebook fan page for one of my make money online blogs. Please “like” it to help me out. You’ll benefit too because there will be certain things I only share with my FB fans. You can click here to go to it. Thanks!

Posted in Social Networking