Its time to realize the power of Social Media Marketing – Part 1

Its difficult getting a business owner to realize the power of social media marketing. I am bringing up this topic because I am having trouble convincing some of my clients the benefits of social sites like Twitter, Facebook and especially LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the most easiest social network communities to subscribe to. There’s not much to setting up a profile on LinkedIn. Plus the benefits definitely outweigh the risks for social profile such as LinkedIn. The only risk I see in managing a social media profile is having one of your company employees manage the sites, and then that employee wasting his/her time on the site.

Social media marketing is an ongoing action that should be done at least once every three days. Posting updates, information about sales, new services or changes to services are all easy things you can create good content on when posting to a social networking site. One of my clients is in the process of taking some video on a job he is about to start. The client? SafeDry Carpet Cleaning. The owner is going to take some video of a concrete polishing job, then post the video onto his YouTube account, where I will then show him the power of video marketing. But that’s another post.

There’s plenty of way to express the power of social media marketing to a client, you can construct charts, gather data from research studies, even show them how your profiles work. Take for instance my Twitter profile, every time I write an article, people re-tweet them. It’s called spreading the good news. It can be very beneficial to your company, especially in terms of search engine optimization.

There is argument on the web about how it is difficult to measure social media marketing because social media in itself can be a broad term. Meaning that the term “social media” can encompass many tools from the Web 2.0 era. There really is no definitive term for what social media actually means. If you look up on Wikipedia you will find:

Not very clear. If you go by that definition then this blog is a form of social media. But it terms of online marketers, I think that social media means a site in which many users contribute to the concept, the media (video, photo’s, etc) and the content (written text) of the site. And of course there has to be social interaction between the users on the site. A normal company website does not accomplish these things. That is why social media marketing is so powerful. With a site like twitter you can tweet sales for products or services and then instantly gain insight to whether or not your consumers like the advert. Let’s say that Acme Widget Company (AMC) tweeted a sale for Widget 1, and the widget was on sale for $9.99 instead of $24.99. A follower read the tweet when they signed on to their twitter account and said, “Hey that’s a great deal, let me share it with my buddies” – then the follower proceeds to re-tweet the great sale that AMC posted and his friends also re-tweeted the sale – So within an hour or two there are over 100 re-tweets of this sale. You can’t accomplish marketing like this with only SEO. SEO provides methods for your website to be searched for on the internet. But SEO does not provide potential clients with real-time tracking of their company, the company’s products or services.

Now AMC, because they had a good website designer, has Google Analytics installed on their website. So they are able to log into Google Analytics and scroll down to “Traffic Sources” and see a list of the top referring sites for their traffic. They could then take this data and further analyze it anyway they like. One of the main ways businesses are able to make money is by analyzing data. If something doesn’t work, then don’t do it anymore and try something new. That’s what we do here. We setup our clients with an effective social media marketing foundation to pave the way for future success with providing a more personable approach to your clients.

Almost all of the top Fortune 500 companies have some type of social media marketing strategy. Profiles like Twitter and Facebook are free, whereas LinkedIn has a free profile and a paid profile, either one works great.

This is Part 1 of 2 – Part 2 Will be posted tomorrow. Stay tuned.

So when you are ready to implement a social media marketing strategy give us a call, we are here to help. And if you already have a social media marketing plan in place, but it’s not doing you any good, then call us for social media optimization. Thanks for reading!