What has always been the simplest 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 1 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 family and friends.
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 per day. The potential for 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 company afford not to participate in this marketing revolution?
If you are like me, you learn from making mistakes. However, if you can study from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. So why not study from the mistakes of others? Below are a few common mistakes new marketers make when attempting to create and implement a social media marketing plan:
I’ll figure it out as I go- the biggest time waster is going right into a social media marketing campaign without any plan. Take time to get educated on social media sites. Not all sites are designed for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will result in many companies abandoning their plan and walking from the strategy. Instead, learn the fundamentals of setting up these site, understand the different options, and spend your time engaging instead of fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs out there that are designed to teach business owners on how to create and implement a social media plan.
Let’s add 100 sites in one day- it’s tempting to venture out and develop a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at one time. But the problem with this strategy is that if you grow too fast, you won’t be able to keep up with all the benefits of each site. Lifestyle Enhancement would be to create one site, like Facebook, learn the details and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and build relationships others. If you start up 12 at once, you will not be as active and your insufficient participation could defeat your current goal. It’s easier to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social networking sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.
Profiles don’t matter- users of social media won’t engage with individuals who don’t possess complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, lots of people will find you before they find your website. If they find your site and you have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be 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 some 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 this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a fresh medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Instead of 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 an agent, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on which they can do to sell a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By providing valuable information, you will become an expert on the subject. Then, when the reader is ready to sell their house, they will most likely ask for your services.
Same approach to communication- not everyone receives information through exactly the same medium. Some people prefer to read, others like video, and some people will be attracted to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up the way you post. If you to put it simply out a blog every day, your followers will become blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. Assuming you have a blog one day, then put up a simple video the next. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you’ll achieve.
Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media activity. This doesn’t mean 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 easier to have 1 post each day than 3 days with 10 posts.
Do it all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I would use to communicate with people. Needing to log into multiple accounts every day to check on the emails became annoying, frustrating, and ineffective. The truth 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 utilize the benefits of email. The same applies to social media. When you have to log into and log off of 5 different social media marketing sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that will allow you to log into all of your social media makes up about interactions may be the best way to make sure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are several good all-in-one social media dashboards that will allow you to streamline your accounts and social networking efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner looking to create a social media marketing plan for your business, you then absolutely should learn how to utilize the technology and find tools to work with you in the daily utilization. Unless you know how to create a house and you don’t have a hammer, that house isn’t likely to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in this post, it will be easy to quickly and effectively create & implement your own profitable social media marketing plan.