How To Use Social Media To Grow Your Business

How To Use Social Media To Grow Your Business

The tools available to market products and services are numerous. Direct response marketing, Internet marketing, brand awareness campaigns and more are all labels for marketing programs. In every case, the goal is the same…increase revenue and profits.

My experience working with companies to grow profits is extensive. (Click Here for my resume)  I have developed my views on marketing from actual experience implementing programs, monitoring the results and continuously testing ideas to improve response rates and profitability. Social media is phrase representing an ever increasing number of places people congregate. Social media marketing is just that..marketing to people using social media sites.

There are a number of credible people holding seminars, selling courses and offering consulting on how to do social media marketing. My recommendation to business is to  focus on your business.  My company will build your social media network and I will work with you to develop and implement your social media marketing program. These are two very distinctly separate tasks.

How we build a social media network  is based on my actual results in developing several of my own business ventures and providing  these services to clients. I have personally done the social media work staring February 2008 .  Since that time I completed the detailed steps. I will highlight some of them in this article. From this experience I  recommend what steps you should leverage to others and the tools I feel are a must have for developing your network. This is for people very serious about using social media as a business building tool.

Key Marketing Principle Reviewed

Marketing is primarily about attracting traffic to your offer and converting that traffic to customers. Many know this. Most ignore it. I never ignore it. For clarification it is not just any traffic but relevant traffic. What does relevant traffic mean? It means people already interested in what it is you have to offer.

The late Gary Halbert said if you are selling hamburgers, he would rather have a starving crowd than all the positioning of signs, building, location and all of the other things we normally address in marketing a physical product like hamburgers. It is every marketer’s dream to have a starving crowd. I am no different. The starving crowd is not right outside my door. I need to find them and so do you.

The Cloud

My view of the cloud is simply an image of all the people using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. So when I use the phrase the cloud that is what I mean.

The Goal

Return on investment in time and money is the goal. Sure I work on projects and products where I have expertise and interest. Sure I do things out of curiosity without having any monetization objective, but most of what I do is to drive profitable revenue doing business where I have a high personal interest.  When I do this well, I am compensated by the marketplace for providing value. For me spending time on what I enjoy is not work. However, unless there is income flow, my enjoyment of a an area of personal interest is going to expire. Having said that I will encourage you to make sure your attention span is long enough to allow your business to develop.

To achieve the monetization goal I am  developing as large a portion of the cloud as possible that I can reach. I then continuously send messages intended to invite people I am reaching to consider my offer. Related to this goal is my objective to at also have as many people as possible give me their contact information. That action  tells me  there is some level of interest in what I am offering. For those experienced marketers reading this I am not sending out selling messages. All of the messages are indirect intended to create an interest in wanting more information. Many flavors of messages are used and I am always developing new ones to test.

The Specifics

The work is done by my company New Digital Media, Inc. I work with all clients directly. When the scope of the work is defined some of the tasks that I previously have done personally are leveraged. The staff working with me is very experienced and they actually develop their own network which I encourage. We share social media network growth tips.

Our primary focus is on growing Twitter and Facebook accounts. Within Facebook we work with clients  to grow friends and when friends are at a certain level we build a targeted group. As  a  group is being built we implement a messaging strategy to the group. We are gradually expanding our focus into several other social media sites. However, for now Twitter and Facebook is out primary focus.

The goal of the network is to drive interested people to a landing page or a product sales page. As appropriate, we advocate the destination to be a blog article.  As articles are added they serve as destinations for new messages to the network. In certain cases we will promote a client through our own network which is quite large.

We use a combination of tools to assist us in growing accounts. Most of these tools are used with Twitter. There are no automation tools we use to grow Facebook friends and groups. We use an automation tool to assist us with posting messages to Twitter and Facebook. This tool has the capability to post messages to LinkedIn, MySpace and more.  The primary tools we use and recommend if you are doing this work yourself are:

Hummingbird for growing Twiter followers

Tweet Later – message management

Tweep

Instant Capture Pages

Blogs – WordPress format exclusively This Site Shows You How To Set One Up – Free

Autoresponder – Aweber

Web Hosting – Host Gator

Each person in the company uses at least two computers. It is not practical to run our automation tools and do our other work on one machine. This can be done but it will affect productivity by at least 50%.

Effectiveness

The following Twitter accounts were developed in six weeks. digialmediabiz 9735 followers. buildprofits 8694 followers So those are a couple examples of  accounts growing.

Size of our total network – very large

On Facebook we grew the group Deliberate Creation to over 2,500 members in three weeks.  This happens to be a very niche market and we were very pleased with how rapidly this developed.

Return on Investment – we have numerous success stories for ourselves and for clients.  However, it has taken quite awhile to systematize what works. Additionally, we are constantly monitoring the rules of the social media sites as they can change and we want to be in compliance.  For these reasons, I highly recommend looking at our company to help you grow your network which allows  you to focus on growing your business.

Based on Twitter’s current algorithms we can build an account to 10,000 followers in about two months. Facebook has a limit of 5000 friends and it can take 6 months or longer to hit that level. Remember once built, these assets are in place for multiple  purposes.

Personally my network is used to market consulting services, New Digital Media  and several other ventures. I noticed the most significant improvement in what we do once I developed  a laser beam focus on our objective and finding the right staff. Both are in place. The difference between my company and most of the people who are experienced, is we do it for you and hand over the results. Along the way we teach  you so you are in a position to continue the process or have us continue. If you are a large company, I will teach your in-house staff how to do this.

Fees and Referrals

Our fees are quoted for each client. I pay referral fees that average 15% of fees collected. This percentage varies depending on the scope of work performed. Currently we have capacity for a limited number of clients.  With the marketing we are now doing to create awareness of our services, the door for new clients may close quickly. If you are thinking about working with us, I suggest you contact me now.

Contact Information

Steve Pohlit, President
New Digital Media, Inc.
727-587-7871
Email

Sharing with all my readers the energy of peace, happiness and abundance

Steve Pohlit

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About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies.  Steve is business owner and an expert business consultant, direct response and social media marketing  and social networking security expert . Steve is  focused on helping companies improve their business performance. All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.