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 the least expensive & most productive form of advertising. Most people tune out traditional method of advertising. Only one 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a confident 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 word of mouth marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. Premium Vacation Packages has 130 friends and is connected to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets go out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views per day. The potential for your message to be spread by raving fans is more frequent today through social media than any other amount of time in the annals of business. Can your company afford not to participate in this marketing revolution?
If you’re like me, you learn from making mistakes. However, if 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 when i go- the largest time waster is going into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take the time to get educated on social media sites. Not all sites are designed for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all of the benefits of the website. Correcting mistakes is very time consuming and will result in many business owners abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the fundamentals of setting up these site, understand the different options, and spend time engaging instead of fixing problems. There are good online educational programs out there that are designed to teach business owners on how best to create and implement a social media plan.
Let’s add 100 sites in a single day- it’s tempting to venture out and create a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at once. But the problem with this strategy is that should you grow too fast, you won’t be able to match all the great things about each site. The very best approach is to create one site, like Facebook, learn the facts and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and build relationships others. If you set up 12 at once, you will not be as active and your insufficient participation could defeat your current goal. It’s better to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social media 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 have complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, many people will see you before they find your site. If they find your site 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 importantly, be personable.
Here’s the pitch- here’s the biggest stumbling block for most beginning marketers. After 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 trying to imitate these ineffective methods on a fresh 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 where you are practicing. For example, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself and 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’ll become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell his / her house, they will probably ask for your services.
Same method of communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people prefer to read, others like video, plus some people will be drawn to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up the way you post. If you simply put out a blog each day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it up a little. Assuming you have a blog 1 day, then put up a simple 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 activity. This doesn’t imply that you must make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal is to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, 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 truly have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I’d use to talk to people. Needing to log into multiple accounts every day to check the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The fact is, it became to time consuming to get this done and I hardly ever 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 from 5 different social media sites each day, it will become tiresome and your level of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that will enable 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 marketing plan. Again, there are several good all-in-one social media dashboards that will allow 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 build a house and you don’t have a hammer, that house isn’t going to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in this article, you will be able to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media marketing plan.