Social Media Success Tips for Your Business

Social Media Marketing is the most misunderstood form of new media, costing companies thousands, if not millions, in wasted time and money.

The other day, I posted a blog with Social Media Networking Statistics and received several phone calls from people wanting help and a social media action plan. In this blog posting, you’ll find three tips to help you make sure your social media marketing efforts are headed in the right direction to help your business grow.

Three Things You Need to Know about Monetizing Your Social Media Efforts

1. Recognize that you cannot ignore Social media and Web 2.0 user generated websites. Beyond the obvious sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook… there are several ratings websites where people’s opinion of you can either hurt or help your brand. You need to monitor and manage your online reputation. You need to know how far and wide your digital footprint is on the web.  Start with setting up Google Alerts. Then Google your company, your products and leaders of your company to see what shows up on the search results pages (SERPS).
2. Social Media is about Relationships. Your goals and focus should be to build relationships, engage your customers, encourage feedback, and offer value. Don’t blatantly promote by continually spamming your friends, followers, or subscribers. Do I really need to explain that in more detail?  Of course, once you’ve added value and fostered the relationship you’ll be able to tactfully introduce solutions that lead to increased traffic to your website and more sales.
3. Based on your Internet marketing goals, get the help you need from qualified and experienced social media experts. Use caution because there are way too many people claiming to be “experts” and it’s a very broad field of information.  Decide your goals and if you are either going to do it yourself (DIY) or hire someone to help you monetize your social media efforts.

   1. Doing it yourself. You can certainly learn everything you need to know on your own if you’re willing to take the massive amount of time necessary to read, watch, and review the online tutorials on each of the social media websites. Then spend months experimenting to see what works and hopefully in the process not get your account banned or irritate your target prospects.  Not Suggested. However, if you want to learn what works yourself, then get Mari Smith’s Quick Start Social Media Kit. This package is ideal for small business owners wanting to ramp up their social media success significantly.  Even though we are experienced social media professionals, we’ve learned a ton from her.
   2. Hire a Social Media Professional. Prime Concepts can help you get all of your profiles correctly setup with congruent branding, integration and aggregation. Then we’ll show you how to make the most of your efforts in the shortest amount of time.

Remember, you cannot just hire someone to do all of your social media as it requires participation, content, views, opinions and expertise that only you (or your company) possess.  You can hire the setup, configuration, branding, custom backgrounds, links, and integration. The success of your efforts is then dependent upon how much you participate on the various social media websites.

Start your Social Media Link-back strategy by posting your comments, questions or opinions on this post.