Developing a Basic Social Media Strategy
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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn—these are names that have become buzzwords not only among consumers but also among business marketers. In today’s online marketing environment, companies that have not developed a viable social marketing strategy fall leagues behind their social media savvy competitors. Now is the time to develop and implement a social media marketing strategy that will put your name in front of audiences and help increase not only brand recognition and loyalty, but also trust.
Your primary goal when developing a social marketing strategy should be to establish conversation parameters. You cannot possibly control the direction of every conversation, nor should you try to, but you can be available to answer questions and provide honest and helpful input wherever possible. People visit social networking sites because they want to have conversations that don’t involve sales pitches. In order to gain trust, you’ll need to create an environment in which potential customers feel free to express opinion without fear of being censored, but also in which you can provide responses to negative comments that help viewers understand the reasons behind your company’s actions in any particular area. When appropriate, you can point readers toward your product, but in such a way that they feel you are providing useful information rather than pitching your company.
Facebook and Twitter provide the logical starting place for your social media strategy. If you don’t have accounts at these two sites, create them as soon as possible. By doing so, you’ll reserve your company username and gain instant access to millions of viewers. Evaluate the presence of your competitors and begin building a platform from which you can provide information about your company to your target audience. The next step in your social media strategy should be to create a company blog. Determine what issues are likely to be important to your target audience and blog about them. Creative content and excellent writing will help you build a loyal audience that will share your blog posts with friends and attract more readers to your site.
LinkedIn offers business networking with millions of users. If you’re not a member, sign up immediately to begin building a network of contacts that can help you promote your business. Work toward receiving recommendations from customers and colleagues on your LinkedIn account, since these can help you gain credibility and increase your search result ranking. LinkedIn is especially beneficial for those who are B2B.
Once you’ve built the base for your social media strategy by creating the accounts above, it’s important that you become active in other venues around the web. Participate in other people’s blogs and keep an eye out for mentions of your company or service at other sites. Set up Google alerts for your company and/or your name and respond to comments that are made about your company or product. By maintaining an active presence on the web, you can build customer loyalty and trust while gaining a greater audience for your company’s services and products.
Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates! Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients.
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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are popular, so we can use them for SEO and business maybe.
Thanks Justin, I like to think I have done a lot of the above. My problem is not spending enough time on my MM. Facebook was a big let down for me and I hardly receive any traffic from it. As a business, you can only create a page unless you want to pay. This has limited options. However saying that I am guilty of not promoting my facebook page.
Conversations is also another aspect, which is hard to maintain. Will review my SMM.
BTW – Is SMM the same as SMO?
Hi,There are tons of different social media places that you can use. Networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are two and then there are social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. Each of the different sites is going to be used differently.
Good information about social media strategy.Best wishes goes to all.
First off, you didn’t say what you would need a social media strategy for. Do you have your own online company? Do you blog? Are you trying to get into Internet marketing? Social media is a marketing way to increase the traffic to a website or blog.
Companies that get active on Social Networks are going to have the advantage over those that don’t. Even small companies will have to figure out what to do because clients will be talking about them and will want to be able to reach them online.
One solution many will need to consider is collaborating with very active Social Media users because they simply do not have the time to do it themselves. That is the theme of the post CommentLuv shows for this comment.
Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..How Personal Branding Can Be Made Scalable
Wow!!it is really a great thought on Social Media Strategy with have good suggestion.I think you really need to sit down and think about what you know about social media and what you really want to achieve by using it for your marketing. I would suggest starting off looking at the biggest ones and most prolific ones e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.
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By adding your blog to your company page your LinkedIn page will share your latest blog post with the professional community.
@Teeth WhitenerNo Gravatar-I think this sort of site is only visited by the business related people and you also know that.So of course everyone who visit this blog must have something in mind related with business.When i visited this blog i liked the article and that’s why i made a comment.Visit my company http://micropartsusa.com/ and tell me your opinion about it.Take care.
Anyway Justin, I am waiting for your next blog post. When is it going to happen?
Been hearing a bit about LSI but not had much chance to look into it. Would like to hear your take on it.
That’s a great topic suggestion! I will make that the next post. Once the dust settles a bit, I’ll put it together:)
Great stuff. I have subscribed to your feed so look forward to it. maybe you can put it a nutshell, all the others seem to like writing books about it. LOL
I think you really need to sit down and think about what you know about social media and what you really want to achieve by using it for your marketing. I would suggest starting off looking at the biggest ones and most prolific ones e.g.
Strategy implies that your competing with someone, so what tactics would you use to be competitive in a social media.
I think the one thing to remember in creating your social media strategy is that you can’t be all things to all people. Pick the social networks that best align with your business and participate in those on a regular basis. Don’t try and have 150 profiles pages set up in different networks as you will never be able to manage them effectively.
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Social media networks work great, but you need to TUNE into THEM, not create a new system.The way people succeed with marketing inside social media is to use and utilize Facebook, Twitter and MySpace for their communication. As a company you would want to use them to broadcase your message about your services and offers without being “advertisy”.
I kept hoping the social media fad was just a fad but it looks like it’s here to stay. I might actually have to learn to use some of them soon. Naw.
At least not today or tomorrow.
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Your posts have even more significance now with traffic based serps. Justin, do you predict future?
I don’t have twitter,fcbk, or other. Maybe it’ll be my new year 1st task 
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Really it is a very nice techniques for increase ethical traffic on website & really very thanks to you for sharing such a very interesting and informative post please keep sharing such a very interesting posts.
Good Informations about basic social sedia strategy. Thanks for that. Have a Merry X-Mas and a Happy New Year!
I for one think social has given consumers the voice they deserve, I am especially interested in see the long term effects of sidewiki. I think of all the possible ways to make a point about a product or service, have the ability to post right on the page and even highlight the specific text one wants to comment on is
I’ve been part of the social media for some time now I get some traffic but not to much. I’ll try to use this type of strategy. Social media seems to be one of the best ways to promote a business these days. great post.
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Before you can even establish a strategy, you have to know what your goal is. Do you just simply want more traffic to your site? Do you want to sell more products? Are you looking to make money off Adsense or a pay per click? Or do you just want to reach new people and network in order to get your name out in the Internet? All of these questions should be answered before you can build your strategy.
First off, you didn’t say what you would need a social media strategy for. Do you have your own online company? Do you blog? Are you trying to get into Internet marketing? Social media is a marketing way to increase the traffic to a website or blog.
Good point. Definitely need to know why you would want to implement a social media strategy. Typically the end result being more sales or more blog subscribers. That is being done through more traffic to your websites through a social media strategy. Again, this is a very basic level strategy. Much more in-depth strategies are being compiled into an Ebook to be released sometime in Q1 of this year!
Your social media post is good and brings up some valid points, glad I found your post! I believe that social media is going to be the future home for any and all advertising and marketing. With Google’s real-time search and other search engines catching on quickly you will see many SEO Companies becoming Twitter SEO Companies very soon! I wrote a post that you may be interested to read about Twitter SEO
I am an avid Twitter user and focus on building the value that I add to the rest of my social network, I help to promote any and everyone that asks me for help (as long as they are not loco in la cabessa!). I believe that optimizing your profiles is very important, just as optimizing your website is, but the most important part of any SEO efforts is having quality content. The same goes for Twitter, you need quality content and updates for people to read and link to. If you tweet about the right subjects you will notice more and more incoming links to your twitter profile when your tweets start being republished on other people’s blogs (provides some temporary page rank). Also you can do your own personal “Social Media Press Release” and some good old fashioned article directory link building with your Twitter profile.
Social media is the first step to an “open-source” media and news. My twitter username is @gohewitt for anyone looking to follow. I am excited to see what comes of all of this and feel that we still don’t have a clue what being “Connected” really means just yet!
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I think that without a doubt social media is changing the landscape for advertisers. Twitter, facebook, blogs, video, etc is a way to speak to consumers and not just at them.