This past week has been all about Social Media Marketing for me. On Tuesday, I interviewed the fabulous Ariel Hyatt from Cyberpr for the Artist’s EDGE Membership “Interview With an Expert” Series. She answered very clearly the question:
Social Media Marketing – Why?
And then on Thursday, I attended an in depth seminar with Ann Evanston from Warrior-Preneur.com called Twitter Technology Training (or T3 for short!). In this event Ann answered very clearly the question:
Twitter Marketing – How?
How serendipitous to do these to trainings back to back. Because now, I’m completely fired up about doing the social media thing the right way – and I no longer feel completely overwhelmed by it. And so, of course, I want to help you feel the same way.
Around the turn of our new century it became clear to most small business owners that they were going to have to have a web presence if they wanted to create success doing what they loved. I believe that we are experiencing a similar tipping point around social media marketing. You’re just going to have to have a presence in the social media world in order to create a successful business doing what you love. Not doing it means leaving a lot of money on the table and giving your competition, who is using social media, a huge edge.
So the question then becomes – how do you build this into your marketing strategy in a way that makes sense for your business and for your sanity?
The short answer is to choose the top three social media sites to focus on and then create a system using the tools and techniques to make the most powerful impact with your presence and best use of your time.
Ariel gave us her top 5 and I have to agree. They are:
If you are in the music industry, you absolutely must have a presence on MySpace. If you’re not in the music industry, I recommend against it. I think everybody should be on Twitter and Linkedin. Twitter will help you build a relationship with your clients/customers as well as your colleagues. Twitter is also amazing at increasing your presence across the search engines.
Linkedin will help you build relationships with your colleagues and can be a great source of joint venture opportunities, and an opportunity to build credibility and buzz about who you are and what you do.
I believe the jury’s still out on Facebook and the best way to do business on what is for most people, primarily a social medium. I see a lot of people making some major mistakes on Facebook – such as inviting people to a local event 3000 miles away from where they live. Event invites are becoming the scourge of Facebook – and I think you can do a lot more harm than good there. But I believe, if used correctly, Facebook can be a great way to deepen your relationship with your fans, clients and customers – Step 7 in the Multiple Streams of Business Income concept.
The power of YouTube has been well established – just take the brilliant “Will It Blend?” campaign created by Blendtec®. The best piece of advice I’ve heard about YouTube is to worry less about the quality of the video and more about the quality of the message.
If it’s too slick, it won’t stick on YouTube!
In addition, there may be other social media sites unique to your target market. There are tons of sites and new ones being added by the day. I recommend picking your top 3 and get things up and running there, before adding more or you will just get overwhelmed. In order for Social Media Marketing to work for you, you must create a winning strategy and work it consistently over time. Remember the old marketing adage 7-15 touches before you exist in a new customer’s mind. You can’t do that if you start something and don’t maintain it with consistency. And with 17,148 new messages/minute on Twitter (according to Tweetspeed.com (resource no longer available) – a number that changes depending on the day and time of day – but you get the point), consistency is going to be key to your marketing effectiveness.
In Part 2, I’ll talk about the culture and mindset of the social media world as well as some really cool tools that I’ve discovered.
2 Responses
Hey, I came across this site from Yahoo and just wanted to take some time to say thanks for your marketing strategy.
i do Social Media Marketing specially when promoting a new website or an affiliate product. Social media is more effective than offline advertising in my opinion.