What has always been the simplest way to generate home based business? Referrals from existing customers to their friends and families.
Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive & most productive form of advertising. A lot of people tune out traditional method of advertising. Only one 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 based on the input of friends and family.
Social media marketing provides the electronic platform for referral marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The common Facebook user has 130 friends and is linked to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets go out every week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The potential for your message to be spread by raving fans is more frequent today through social media marketing than any other amount of time in the annals of business. Can your company afford not to participate in this marketing revolution?
If you are like me, you learn from making mistakes. However, when you can learn from the mistakes of others, then you will achieve success quicker. Why not learn from the mistakes of others? Here are a few common mistakes new marketers make when trying 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 website. Correcting mistakes is very time consuming 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 on the market 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 go 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 will not be able to keep up with all the great things about each site. The best approach would be to create one site, like Facebook, learn the facts and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and engage with others. If you start up 12 at once, you won’t be as active as well as your insufficient participation could defeat your current goal. It’s better 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 marketing won’t engage with people 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 hardly any personal information, then they will most 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 some beginning marketers. After they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This type of media is really a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional one way marketing practices are a dying breed and trying to imitate these ineffective methods on a new medium will yield 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 which they can do to sell a house themselves. The truth is, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you’ll become an expert on the subject. Then, when the reader is ready to sell his / her house, they will most likely ask for your services.
Same approach to 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 main element is to mix up the way you post. If you simply put out a blog every day, your followers will become blind to your communication method. Change it up a little. Should you have a blog 1 day, then put up a straightforward 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 imply that you have to make posts multiple times each 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 would 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 frustrating to do this and I seldom used my email. However, once Social Media Marketing firm learned to load all of my email accounts into Outlook, I could efficiently check and utilize the benefits of email. Exactly the same applies to social media. If you have to log into and log off of 5 different social media marketing sites each day, it will become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools which will allow you to log into all your social media accounts for interactions may be the easiest way to make sure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are some good all-in-one social media dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social networking efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner looking to create a social media plan for your business, you then absolutely should learn how to use the technology and find tools to assist you in the daily utilization. Unless you know how to build a house and you don’t possess a hammer, that house isn’t going to get built. By taking the steps listed above in this posting, it is possible to quickly and effectively create & implement your own profitable social media marketing plan.
