Social media marketing is increasingly becoming a mainstream for businesses but what exactly is this marketing strategy?  Social media marketing “is when companies take a human approach to marketing by participating in conversations with their audiences. It’s about engaging audiences in an authentic way to provide helpful information, solve problems and build relationships to achieve business goals and gain a leg up on the competition.”

Social Media Marketing Principle and Tips

Jason Peck enumerated 6 Principles of Social Media Marketing:

• Listen
• Engage
• Enable
• Share
• Reward
• Participate

Now let’s see how these principles relate to building a successful social media marketing strategy.

When building your strategy, it’s important to define your goals and how it relates to your company’s overall objective and brand philosophy. Outlining what you would like to achieve out of your social media efforts would keep you on track but you have to ensure that it’s realistic and attainable. Keep in mind that even in social media building brand advocacy will not happen overnight.

Before you jump in the social media marketing bandwagon, you also need to do a lot of research. You need to always consider which social media platform would work best for you in terms of reaching and engaging with your target audience. Search for your brand and listen to what they are saying about you so you’ll know how best to contribute, research on your competitors and which keywords will give back the most usable results. To avoid social faux-pas and getting banished by social media communities, learn the social cultures of the sites you intend to use for your social media marketing strategy.

In social media, you build networks of relationships through conversations. By subscribing to blogs in your industry and creating a “list of influencers who are relevant to your business”, you would have references when it’s time for you to create contents on your social media networks.

After all the research you have done, you can start engaging in conversations and you can do this in so many ways. You can join chats on twitter, joining/liking Facebook groups related to your industry, answering questions posted in Yahoo or LinkedIn, posting comments on forums or blogs, sharing photos, articles, links and videos about your company and industry. Remember that what you put out there should empower people to become a bigger advocate for you and your business. It’s also important to note that you also need to keep your social site updated and fresh – no ones to check out a social site that’s got stale information.

In social media marketing, you also still need to strengthen your relationships offline. Attending offline events related in your industry provides a venue for you to personally network with people who you have met via social media and build sustainable relationships.

Since you have set up goals and objectives for your social media marketing, you should of course measure the results of your efforts. Success of your social network marketing maybe in the form of more followers on twitter, increase in the number of fans and comments on Facebook, or increased traffic to your website through social media campaigns or promotions.  It’s important to note that engaging with your audience through social media will not always provide positive results. You need to constantly evolve and improve your efforts.

Testing and experimentation is the key in perfecting your social media marketing strategy. Perhaps, you can further encourage brand loyalty by offering discounts, promotions, exclusive content and access. Involving sponsors can provide added value to your fans and followers.

As you get more involved in social media you will learn which tools would suit you best, that there are specific days and times where in you need to be more active in social media and that there is always something new to learn. And let us not forget, social media is always within reach, better to think things through before you post or share anything on the social web. Don’t be a spammer on social sites and never use social media to slander your competition because if you do – rest assured you will lose your credibility in a click of a finger.

Integrate social media in your current marketing strategy

When conducting search marketing, you can integrate social media by creating content about your brand and distribute it in the social media sphere. If you are currently doing email marketing, promote your social media in your emails and vice versa. You can further optimize it by adding your most successful content in your email program. As for your virtual events, promote them on the social web. Slideshare is a tool that you can use to share your presentation online. Add social media components by making use of Twebinars – combination of live twitter streams and webinar. For your live events, you can promote and encourage people to join by creating RSVP events on your Facebook page. If you’re on twitter, you can set tweet-ups so you can meet and interact with your followers in three-dimension. Now if you are doing market research, optimize your content on your Facebook page – ask for their opinion – let them participate in idea and product generation. CrowdCampaign is a very helpful too to execute simple crowd sourcing.

Need some help with creating an effective social media marketing strategy for your business or organization? Contact us!

See also:

Search Engine Optimization | Online Advertising | Using Social Media for Business