Social Media Marketing Tips for a Variety of Social Media Networks
There is a plethora of social media and networking sites out there that you can use to promote your business. Social media marketing is all the rage, but it only pays off if you have clear goals and an effective strategy. Here are some tips for how you can use the most popular social media and networking websites out there to market your business.
Twitter is a micro-blogging website that allows you to write updates consisting of 140 characters. It can be a highly effective way to network, promote your products/service, and much more. When you add/follow people on Twitter, they will probably reciprocate. However, try not to add so many people at once because if you are following lots of people and have few followers, it makes you look like a spammer.
Check out the Twitter account of someone in your niche that you respect and see who is following them. Try following those same people and hope that they follow you back. Once you start following someone’s updates, start conversations with them and respond to their updates, and they are more likely to follow you back. Make sure your Twitter profile is very descriptive and don’t forget to include your URL there.
LinkedIn is a social networking website for professionals. A LinkedIn profile can help you build your online brand and network with other professionals in your field and beyond. Include your professional history and educational background on your LinkedIn profile. It is a good idea to include your email address in your LinkedIn profile name as well. This will identify you as an open networker on LinkedIn, meaning that you are willing to have others add you to their network.
LinkedIn Answers is a great tool for doing informal market research. You can ask LinkedIn members questions to get their opinions and feedback on a variety of matters and you can also answer questions to build authority in your niche.
YouTube
YouTube is a video sharing site where you can share presentations, slideshows, speeches at conferences, and other materials to promote your business. YouTube videos are valuable because they rank highly on search engine results and can serve as an effective part of your social media marketing campaign. If you run a company blog, mention that have uploaded videos to YouTube and beg them to become subscribers to your YouTube channel. Your aim should ultimately be to get people to see your videos and then go to your website. You don’t want them to treat YouTube as the final destination. In order to prevent this, include detailed descriptions with your YouTube videos that link back to your main website. You should also update your blogs with all the latest videos posted to YouTube.
Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers also ranks very highly in search engines. In order to get started with Yahoo Answers, sign up for RSS feeds on all the categories and sub-categories you are interested in. Answer people’s questions that are related to your niche and provide them with your name and link. It’s important to leave your name when you answer a question and provide your link to avoid looking like a spammer. You can also team up with your friends to ask and answer each other’s questions. Make sure the questions are keyword-rich in order to achieve good rankings.
Flickr
Flickr is a photo sharing site with many groups you can join and participate in. When choosing Flickr groups to participate in, the level of activity of the group is more important than its size. Comment on people’s photos and join in on discussions. Be careful about what tags you use on your photos because Flickr photos have the potential to rank on the first page of search engine results for certain keyword tags. Link to your Flickr photo stream on your website or blog to send some traffic over there.
Technorati
Technorati can be very useful if you are looking for a list of highly authoritative bloggers to approach in your link-building campaign. When you search for blogs in your niche, set the search option to “a lot of authority.” You´ll find plenty of blogs in your niche that would be highly valuable places to get inbound links.
There are several ways to build a successful social media marketing campaign on Facebook. You can create a Facebook group or Facebook fan page. You can also create a Facebook application. If it goes viral, you will be able to attract a lot of traffic and business to your website. In order to come up with ideas for a viral Facebook application, think about what Facebook lacks and where it could use improvement. Create a Facebook app to fill that need.
So there you have it. The key to success in social media marketing is choosing social media websites to participate in that align with your interests. Don’t join all of them and don’t think about social media websites as places you should take from. Give and provide as much value as possible, and eventually the community will start giving back to you. Spend time getting to know the community prior to diving in so you can learn what the unspoken rules in the community are.
