What has always been the most effective way to generate new business? Referrals from existing customers with their friends and families.
Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both least expensive and most productive form of advertising. Most people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only one 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a positive return on investment. No-one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers will make a purchasing decision in line with the input of friends and family.
Social media marketing supplies the electronic platform for referral marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and is linked to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets venture out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more prevalent today through social media marketing than any other amount of time in the history of business. Can your organization afford not to participate in this marketing revolution?
If you’re like me, you study from making mistakes. However, when you can learn from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. So why not study from the mistakes of others? Here are several common mistakes new marketers make when trying to create and implement a social media plan:
I’ll figure it out as I go- the largest time waster is going into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take time to get educated on social networking sites. Not all sites are designed for businesses. Also, once you learn a site, learn all of the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will lead to many companies abandoning their plan and walking from the strategy. Instead, learn the basics of setting up these site, understand the various options, and spend time engaging instead of fixing problems. There are good online educational programs on the market that are designed to teach business owners on how to create and implement a social media marketing plan.
Let’s add 100 sites in one day- it’s tempting to go out and develop a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at once. But the problem with this particular strategy is that should you grow too fast, you won’t be able to match all the benefits of each site. The best approach is to create one site, like Facebook, learn the details and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and engage with others. If you set up 12 at once, you will not be as active as well as your lack of participation could defeat your overall goal. It’s better to have one or two 2 completely utilized social networking sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.
Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with people who don’t possess complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, lots of people will find you before they find your site. If they find your website and you have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or hardly any personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile is your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most of all, be personable.
Here’s the pitch- here’s the biggest stumbling block for most beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This sort of media is a huge mistake and you will be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a new medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Rather than selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself as an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For example, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to sell a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you will become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is ready to sell his / her house, they will probably ask for your services.
Same approach to communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people like to read, others like video, and some people will be attracted to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up how you post. If you simply put out a blog each day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. If you have a blog one day, then put up a straightforward video another. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you will achieve.
Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media marketing activity. This doesn’t imply that you have to make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal is to make 30 Facebook posts per month, you’ll find it’s better to have 1 post per day than 3 days with 10 posts.
Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I’d use to talk to people. Having to log into multiple accounts each day to check on the emails became annoying, frustrating, and ineffective. Premium Vacation Packages is, it became to frustrating to get this done and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load most of my email accounts into Outlook, I could efficiently check and make use of the benefits of email. Exactly the same applies to social media. When you have to log into and log off of 5 different social media sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that may allow you to log into all of your social media makes up about interactions may be the easiest way to ensure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are some good all-in-one social media dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social media efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner seeking to create a social media marketing plan for your business, you then absolutely should educate yourself on how to utilize the technology and find tools to work with you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to create a house and you don’t possess a hammer, that house isn’t going to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in this article, it will be easy to quickly and effectively create & implement your own profitable social media marketing plan.
