Social Media Marketing – Make Friends with Your Customers and Grow Your Business

Are you a buzz about Twitter? Are your customers addicted to your Facebook page? Is your site are marked by a million people on famous social book marketing site such as Digg.com?

Even if you’re not, more and more Americans are becoming social media junkies every day. According to Facebook, there are more than 250 million people on Facebook worldwide.

And that means if your business isn’t becoming part of the social media revolution, you’re not connecting with your customers where they are.

If you think that social media is just for kids and fun, think again. According to Facebook , there are more users over 55 years old than high school students on the site. Also, according to a study by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law, social networking is being accepted as a key communications strategy in the business world. According to survey results:

• 81% of business executives believe social media can enhance relationships with customers/clients
• 81% of business executives agree social media can build brand reputation
• 64% of business executives see social media as a customer service tool

The most popular social media sites are:

• Facebook (80%)
• Twitter (66%)
• YouTube (55%)
• LinkedIn (49%)
• Blogs (43%)

So how exactly should businesses go about marketing themselves on social media sites? In this kind of medium, it’s not enough to just post an ad on a site: You need to engage with your customers, respond to them, talk and listen. After all, the world of social media is a two-way street.

Social media marketing includes:

• Social network marketing: Social networks are sites where users can create an account and profile to interact with each other, such as Twitter and Facebook. By communicating on social network sites on a daily basis, you can build your brand identity and manage your relationship with your current and potential customers.
• Social bookmarking: On social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, you can list all of your favorite websites, and then you can share your favorites with others. Getting listed here is great, because users are marketing your site for you for free.
• Blogs: Bloggers are often considered experts in their field, so getting bloggers to link to is a great way to improve your branding. You can also create your own company blog, where you can communicate with your customers in a more informal, casual way.
• Forums: Forums are where your customers are talking. Monitor forums to find out what your customers want, respond to their needs and gather new ideas.

9 Tips of successful social media marketing

• Have a clear goal: Evaluate your business opportunities and industry trends. Figure out what you would like to achieve from participating in social media sites. Do you want to improve your customer service? Do you want to build brand loyalty? Do you want to reach new customers? Or do you just purely want to drive traffic to your website?
• Speak directly and casually to your audience: If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face. It’s a two-way conversation. Treat them as friends.
• Embrace controversy: Don’t try to control the user-generate-content. Remember, the people who take the time to post negative comments about your company are also people who engage with your brand a lot. Therefore, instant communication and explanation may turn them from your worst customer into your best and build your brand loyalty.
• Reward user participation: Comment back, reTweet. Remember, it’s a two-way communication.
• Link to other sites: It’s important for SEO. Linking to other sites can help search engines find you, and the more links point to your site, the higher you will rank in search engines.
• Use analytic tools: You can analyze your social media performance and your competitors by using free online tools. For example, you can use Twitalyzer.com to evaluate your branding performance on Twitter. You will easily know how frequently people talk about you, how much of the comments about your brand are positive, how many different topics you appear under and more.
• Have fresh content on your main website: In the social bookmarking world, content is king. The more you update the content on your main website, the more you will show up on social bookmarking sites.
• Tag articles on your main website with keywords: Tags can help categorize you web pages or articles, making it easier for others to bookmark them and find you.
• Integrate your social media marketing strategy with your marketing tactics: Ideally, your social media marketing efforts should work in tandem with your other marketing tactics. For example, if you are hosting a sale, open house or other event, you can post the event on your Facebook page to get the word out about it.

Vance Marketing Solutions’ Social Media Marketing Services:

• Create a social media marketing strategy: We will work with you analyze industry trends and your audience needs to find out where your business opportunities are and how we can use social media to capture this audience’s attention and convert them to customers. We will also analyze your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and determine how we can use social media tactics to gain market share.
• Develop social media marketing plan: Based on the strategy we have created, we’ll help you decide which tools will work best for you, such as bookmarking, social network marketing, blog marketing, video marketing, and more.

Execute social media marketing plan including:

• Create and continually add content on social network accounts
• Actively search for fans on social network sites
• Monitor and respond to users’ comments
• Promote links on social bookmarking sites to promote main website
• Post links on forums and blogs to promote main website
• Add a widget on your main website to promote your social media activity
• Analyze your account performance and provide monthly reports