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
I have actually used Google Reader to help me find job leads.
I go to Craigslist and perform a query in the jobs section for specific keywords that target the kinds of jobs I’m looking for (I search for search engine optimization jobs, but you can really use this for anything). Then, I take the URL that comes from my search query and plug it into Google Reader. Anytime that a new job posting comes up for that keyword, it comes into my reader feed. When I was looking for jobs and saw an interesting listing come across my feed, I was the first one to apply for it. This strategy landed me many calls, and one of them ended up resulting in my current place of employment.
To Follow The Business Development Project Using Social Media connect with the following:
On Facebook
http://steve.facebook.com
http://groups.to/manifest
On Twitter
http://twitter.com/stevepohlit
http://twitter.com/manifestmmind
Interesting facts: 500 new friends were added to our Facebook group in 4 days. 0-1,000 followers were added on Twitter in 4 days.
Sharing with all my readers the energy of peace, happiness and abundance
Steve Pohlit,
The Profit Expert
www.StevePohlit.com
Network with me on Facebook: LinkedIn: Follow me on Twitter
Steve is the President of International Business Consulting Resources. His firm specializes in guiding companies to rapid increases in revenue and profits with a sustainable growth rate. Don’t miss my FREE Report: How To Make More Money With Your Business Now and Long Term I am building my practice and welcome new client inquiries. Call me for a fee consultation at 727-587-7871
This report may be freely distributed without restrictions with the original content including this resource box remaining unchanged. Author: Steve Pohlit, Business Consulting Services, Executive Coaching, please visit www.stevepohlit.com
PS. My doors are open for new clients and referrals are well compensated.