Social Media In Plain Terms
Social media as an umbrella phrase includes sites and services that facilitate interactivity and community. In that regard blogs and email marketing are included. In fact both are an integral part of the marketing funnel.
This series is focused on using the newer and emerging services for business development. The big three are YouTube, Facebook and MySpace in that order. Fast risers are Twitter and LinkedIn. Currently if you placed your social media marketing attention just on those, there still would not be enough time in a day to manually optimize the benefit of these sites. To develop and implement a business development campaign in most cases requires an effective system that includes automation and leverage of very specifically defined tasks.
Which Site Is Best For Finding Your Target Audience?
All of them! Look at the numbers. Twitter which has moved into the 47th highest traffic spot according to Alexa as of the date if this article has an estimated 6 million users. If you have a business then your target audience is there. Your audience is also on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube and many more sites.
I suggest stop analyzing this until the cows come home and get to work. The key is knowing how to properly use each account and attracting your target audience to your landing page, blog or website. How you use Facebook is going to be different than how you use Twitter etc. All most likely are going to be linked and you will be using one of several applications to update multiple social media accounts through one interface. http://ping.fm is a popular one that works very well.
Twitter is particularly unique since each person has 160 characters for a profile biography and is limited to 140 characters per message. It is also unique since according to Alexa most people stay on the first page of tweet flow (message displays). This is a message ticker tape system. The newest message is posted at the top of the page and that pushes the last message on the page off.
Many people focus on growing a large number of followers. The key is followers who are your target audience. So how do you know that? Start with Internet marketing 101 principles which is a clear definition of your target market. Then what are the primary keywords related to your target audience? Using the search function find out who is tweeting about those topic and follow them. You can expand this by following their followers.
Balance Twitter followers and following by going to your View All Following screen and then looking for those people that do not have a direct message link. You can only direct message people if they follow you. If after a few days someone has not followed you and you are attempting to balance the ratio, click delete. There are some people and services that do not follow much at all but their content is valuable. That is your choice.
More Twitter Tips in future additions. For now this will get you started and will help experienced users. Again this is written with the goal of building business revenue and profits using social media.
Marketing
There have been no fundamental changes in the principles of successful marketing. In order to convert targeted traffic into sales there must value and you must effectively communicate the value. Start with your funnel and using Twitter as example. You are forming a relationship with your target audience. Your tweets should have value. If they constantly scream buy this or that, your efforts will be futile and are likely to get you banned.
Next
In the next article in this series I will take a closer look at some of the features, benefits and pitfalls of specific social media sites. In the meantime, every day you spend thinking about this or trying to figure it out on your own, is a day where you are not optimizing your sales that are possible using traffic from social media. I suggest you get started now by emailing me.
Email Me, Steve Pohlit to schedule A No Obligation Consultation On Building Your Business Profits. Need more customers? Let’s discuss how to use cutting edge Social Media Marketing in the revenue building cycle of your business to drive your profits sky high.
Sharing with all my readers the energy of peace, happiness and abundance
Steve Pohlit, The Profit Expert
FREE Report:
How To Increase Business Profits by 30% or More in 90 Days or Less
Great post. Twitter used to it’s maximum potential is very powerful.
People who are new to online marketing should not use all the social networking sites. Pick one. Learn the ins and outs. When you feel comfortable and that may take months, add another. It takes about 5 hours a day to handle the traffic one busy site generates. If you try to handle too many, your fans/friends/customers will be upset that you don’t respond.
Well written post! Of You Tube, Facebook and MySpace the person just moving into social media should start at Facebook since it has it’s own advantages. It’s easy enough to get used too and logically twitter would tie right in. Take the time to answer questions, respond to other peoples content, as well as checking out what they are doing and engaging them in the coversation.
You are correct about not having enough time in the day to optimize all the services without automation.
“To develop and implement a business development campaign in most cases requires an effective system that includes automation and leverage of very specifically defined tasks.”
Remember in business our time is best spent in our specialty so it’d be wise to consider a consultation if this isn’t yours.
I didn’t expect to actually find this post useful, but I did. Great job! I’m going to have to check out LinkedIn. Is that like twitter? Or myspace? or a social bookmark site? Or what?
Neat informative post! thanks
In the last two or three decades dramatical changes happened to the world, and in a new world, some of old principles of business maybe won’t work. Today, interested users become a very important but also rare resource. Many companies offer great features on the Internet but there is almost nobody to use them – not even for free. I’ve got idea of a project to (try to) solve the problem – check the site: wheel.shoutem.org, just the beginning. It can become more if it will be reasonable. Target groups: 1) freaks seeking new great technologies on the Web, 2) sites offering such technologies/technology platforms and seeking interested public. For me it’s not about money, I’m not going to make any money with that, it’s only about the idea. If you have any suggestions you can post them on the wheel microblog ( wheel.shoutem.org) or contact me on twitter (http://twitter.com/actionhiglander).
My power combo is LinkedIn and Twitter. I use twitter for building my target market with a broad net. LinkedIn is better for direct contact with people with whom you’ve already connected. The real business gets done in LinkedIn, but the reaching gets done in Twitter. Facebook, well, there’s a huge audience so you can’t ignore it, but people still seem to be doing more personal stuff there, for now at least.
Great article.
Twitter Karma is good for seeing who doesnt follow you, you can unfollow all in one go if you want – http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/