Social media marketing is all about creating compelling content, distributing it towards valuable channels, measuring the impact and success of the entire process, learning from the mistakes and not repeating them in the future.
One important thing about social selling is that the success doesn’t come overnight. Things have to be built upon pieces by pieces, relationships have to be nurtured, contacts with influencers have to be made and on the top of it good, relevant and shareable content has to be created on a regular basis. Here we list 5 important steps which will help you tremendously in social marketing and creating an influential brand in online market space.
1. Select the right channel: Social media is flooded with websites, which have their own personas and style of marketing and to add to the complexity new sites are cropping up regularly. Matching your customers with the social media platform on which they are interacting is the first important step towards creating a successful social media marketing program. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, PinInterest, Youtube, Flickr to name a few – choose any one or more, which suit your marketing goals and stick to it.
2. A professional profile: Just being present on a platform won’t help much but in fact can do a lot of damage to your brand’s professional reputation. There are steps to create professional looking profiles on each one of the social media channels and a lot of material supports and graphics are available on the internet to achieve your goals. Don’t forget your logo and business tag line. These will be the most helpful in embedding your brand image in the minds and hearts of your users. The more appealing, catchy, trendy your logo and business tag line backed with a superb product, the greater are your chances of getting viral and eventually successful on social media.
3. Start Networking: Once you have selected your preferred platform and built a professional profile on the network it is time to start connecting with the people. First thing to do is to reach out to your friends and friends of friends to create initial buzz. Try to connect with as many people as possible and tell them about your product, be it your co-worker, ex-coworker or people who you trust on your LinkedIn network. Start +1 their post on google , tweeting about their post RT their tweets etc. In short the first step is to engage. Once you start networking, entice your users or followers to share your product with their peers this could be done by giving promotional offers, freebies, free-ebooks, discount coupons , free t-shirts etc. Connecting with influencers in your domain is one thing you should never miss. Try to find as much influencers (people with large fan followings or twitter followers or LinkedIn followers) and start interacting with them. Endorse their posts, Retweet their tweets, endorse them on linked in. Slowly when you have a story well enough to grab their attention share it with them. Once an influencer gets hold of your story and shares it with his/her network, you’ll experience a quantum jump in your online marketing and reputation of your brand.
4. Create something shareable: A whitepaper, an infographic, an irresistible offer, product samples – there are lots of things which you can start with in order to grab the attention of your readers and influencers. The idea is create an excellent first impression. Churning out content that most of the publishers out there do day after day won’t get you anywhere. To get attention and success you’ve to stand out from the crowd and provide something of great value to your followers, which they can pass on to their network and your product gets the leverage it needs.
5. Keep track of your network: There is no business in this world, which has a 100% satisfactory customer base. This will be the case with you also. Customers wants brands to listen to their suggestions, solve their problems, react to their conversations and who knows there might be hidden gems inside these suggestions, complaints and conversations for your business. So it becomes very essential to monitor what is said about your brand or product and respond to it in a timely and professional manner. It will be of tremendous help if you are able to develop a clear cut style of your own and use it for your customer service as it will help you stand out from the bland approach others have towards similar situations. There are lots of free listening tools available on the internet like TweetDeck, HootSuite and paid ones too like Hubspot etc. These tools help you organize and listen to your social profiles. Hashtags on twitters are like keywords, which help you listen to any conversation about that topic in an easy way. In short keeping in touch always pays.
Selling to social media is not a very difficult task to handle. In fact it is just an online version of great customer service. The only challenge that comes with it is the speed at which a message is delivered across a network. So keeping it right and spreading correct message the very first time will definitely take your brand a long way.
Article by Anil Agarwal
Anil has written 338 articles .
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BloggersPassion was started on Jan 01, 2010 on the world’s most awesome blogging platform- WordPress. This blog was started to share blogging tips and for helping you become a successful full time blogger. Blogging is an art and the more you do it, the more you perfect you become.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Anil,
I really liked going through your article. Well, Social media marketing have definitely gained more importance among people. Selecting the right channel and having a proper profile is definitely important for your social networking site to look more and more professional to your visitor’s eye. Thanks for the share!!
your points are really commendable. having a professional profile and networking helps in increasing traffic. quality content is what people like to follow. thanks.
Great Tips Anil
Create a personal networks is really helpful for social media marketing, after google panda now social media marketing is really important………..
Hi Anil,
Great post, I like what you say about keeping in track with your network. This is so important. We need to know what our networks are thinking and saying about us. We can’t just put content out there and then not engage with our friends, followers and customers,
Thanks for sharing,
Beth
Hello Anil,
Quite an interesting post. I think social media is all about interaction and connection if we know how to interact with people how to establish connection with them then i think we can do much better in social media
Interesting article with great tips.
Social media is important for online business, because this is the easiest way to establish a connection with visitors and introduce business to other.
Thanks for this article!
by social media marketing we can earn more money because today many people are addicted to social media so we can easily get traffic thanks for sharing,,