One of the keys of getting your content shared by others is knowing of what others want to read and what they find interesting. Last week I published a blog post titled “Creating magnetic content for digital marketing” explaining this in detail. There are some methods you can use that will make your content be shared more often, but the quality of those shares may not be the best. Funny and silly images always gets shared and the same can be said for funny videos.

Your digital marketing campaign

If you are a business owner or in charge of your digital marketing campaign, care needs to be taken with the type of content you would like to be shared. Of course you want your content to be shared, but do you want the content not related to your business be associated with your brand? This is a simple mistake that many people make. An image or video link can get shared a lot, but ask where it originated from and no one would probably know. Concentrating only on shared material is a big mistake. It is important that you own the material that will get shared together with spreading your message. In plain English: Focus on content that is shared and connected to your business.

I know it is easier said that done, but have a look online and you will find many brands that have achieved success with this, most of the time trying out new things, but in the end they are promoting their brand. If you are interested in increasing social media sharing on your content, make sure you are not doing it for the wrong reasons. It is your business or brand that you are trying to promote, not the dog next door.

If you have a small business or working solo, it may feel at times that you are physically working around the clock with your busy schedule to get things done. How on earth and when are you supposed to update your social media profiles, post a new blog post or tweet?

Creating a social media marketing plan and integrating it into your busy schedule so that it becomes routine could be tricky to many, but it is really fun and exciting because it is a lifestyle change. Don’t look at social media as a series of tasks that you have to complete everyday, but how you can incorporate it into your way of thinking.

Here’s a couple of tips that can help you get started with this.

Morning schedule

Do you start your day with reading the newspaper at breakfast? Try incorporating tweeting with your breakfast. Instead of reading all the latest newspaper headlines, read your RSS reader, twitter stream or a list you are following on Twitter to find interesting articles that you can share with your network.

If you still want to read the newspaper in the mornings, did you know that most of these print publications can be found online and you can share it with your network? In addition to your breakfast, take a few seconds to post a tweet in the morning and you can also do this when you have a morning or afternoon break.

Changing your lifestyle

Instead of walking through your busy schedule everyday not seeing what goes on around you, try to look at the world from a different perspective. Examine everything you see offline and online such as advertisements, news, images, and even the conversations that you have with the people you deal with on a daily basis. You can use this information as content for your blog posts and social media updates.

This doesn’t mean that you have to constantly be online every second, it simply means looking and thinking how you can integrate social media in your daily life.

Blogging

In my opinion, blogging is one of the most important factors for any business on getting found online. Your blog can be the heart and soul of your social media marketing campaign. It can increase your organic SEO rankings, display transparency, increase your brand awareness, increase your credibility, and inform the audience you are trying to reach so that they know who you are.

Blogging can really be time-consuming. I know because I have been doing it for 4 years. If you find it difficult to blog on a daily basis, make notes of your everyday schedule and save your blogging agenda for over the weekend when you are more open. Most blogging platforms such as WordPress will allow you to schedule blog posts at a later time.

Pace yourself

When you first start with social media marketing and how you are going to integrate it into your schedule, it really works to take small baby steps and spread your updates throughout the day. At first, it will take some time to integrated this new way of thinking into your business, but after a while you won’t believe how your business managed without social media.

Mobile

Being mobile is an absolute must with social media marketing. Whether you have a tablet, notebook or smartphone, being mobile can help you integrate social media into your busy lifestyle. Whether you are waiting in line at the post office, taking a 5 minute break, being mobile will help you stay connected, with the ability to update your social media status in a couple of seconds.

When you take the plunge of integrating social media with your business to support your overall digital marketing initiatives, it is crucial to be consistent if you want to engage with the audience you are trying to reach and to increase your online reputation. By integrating social media into your everyday schedule, it will prevent you from spreading your reach too thin. Take short breaks during your day to post a new update, tweet, commenting or leave your blogging schedule for over the weekend.

For larger businesses, a positive online reputation plays a huge role as most of their reputation has already been built online or offline, but for small businesses, how are you going to prove who you are to attract visitors and converting them into sales? Luckily, the web  makes this fairly easy and you only have to spend a little time updating your business information online.

Updating your website

For most small businesses online, the answer is right on your own website. Having an optimized and well written “About” page explaining your who you are doesn’t take long to prepare. Your “About” page can tell interested visitors (customers) quite a lot about your business and your values. Where you come from, who you are, and what experience and skills your employees and yourself have that can help customers feel safe doing business with you.

Another important page you can update is your Contact page. This page on its own can help by displaying correct information on where interested visitors can contact you directly. Use links to your blog, social media profiles, and telephone number that potential prospects can use to talk to you in person. If you only have an email address on your contact page, do you think everyone will try to contact you the old way? Also add your business to Google places where you can place your business on Google maps and include your website. This is another way where potential customers can contact you.

Positive reviews

Add a couple of positive reviews you have received from customers on your website. When visitors to your website see that others had a good experience with your business, they might also feel that they can trust you. Do you have a good About your business page? Can people contact you immediately? Can people verify who you say you are? If I can answer these questions with a “yes” for all, I may well do business with you. If I can’t, I’ll definitely look for someone else, and so will many other visitors of your website. Don’t lose a sale because you haven’t placed the correct information on your website.

Your online reputation management campaign starts with your own website.

How are you going to bridge the gap between your customers and yourself? One way you can accomplish this is with branding. With branding you will also be able to accomplish three things:

• Make your services and products more visible to your target market.
• Be at the top when someone is looking for any service or product you offer.
• Increased conversions.

Social media marketing is growing at the speed of light and it is an efficient and simple way that you can use for branding purposes. Everyday you will find more businesses jumping onto the social media marketing bandwagon to integrate this new medium into their current marketing initiatives to meet their business goals. Here’s a couple of ways you can use social media marketing to start building up your brand with Web 2.0.

Your sales message

If you can create magnetic content that catches the attention of your target market and they share the content with their own network and community, your sales message will be magnetic. This content is not always just “text” and it could be in the form of images, videos or just an infographic. In plain English: it is content you create to engage with people online.

Using social media channels

There are thousands of social media channels online that you can use to start building trust regarding your brand online. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ are the biggest channels that consists of millions of members. While your goal should never be to spam on these channels, be active on these channels and network with the people you would like to reach.

Make your content sharable

Make it as easy as possible for consumers to share your content with their own network. While you could try to reach everyone you would like to target on your own, I promise you that you will get frustrated and very tired. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and most of the other popular social media channels all provide tools that you can integrate on your website or blog to make sharing functionality easy. Once you have this setup, encourage your users to use the tools.

Interacting with your target audience

Talk to you customers and find out if they are experiencing any problems with your services or products. Answer their questions and show them that you care about their problems. On LinkedIn you will find many groups that have discussion groups that you can participate in. Look where you can answer and always tie in the relevance of your service or product.

Don’t focus on only one channel

As said before, there are thousands of social media channels that you can use to start building up your brand online. Choose the ones where your target market spends most of their time on. Get to know how these channels work, and how you are going to use them to start building up your brand.

While this may work for a while, it is definitely going to be difficult to maintain it in the long run. Especially as your client responsibility grows. We want to do all with social media, but it is not possible without burning yourself out in the end. If you are starting out with social media, what can you do so that you can keep on going without burning yourself out? Here’s a couple of tips that will help you with this.

What are you goals?

With social media, it is really easy to get distracted with your own personal network and your competitors. Your competitors might be bolder, brighter, and might be more in your face than you are, but don’t worry. Keep your goals focused on what you are busy doing and why you are doing it. Stick to your social media goals and work to achieve them.

Social media channels

Social media is fun and while you think it is going to be best to put all your clients and yourself on every single popular social media channel, it is very likely that not every channel is going to be appropriate for every campaign. If you are continuously listening to the audience you are trying to reach on the various social media channels, you can then decide which one’s are going to be the best for your campaign. I have found that in the beginning it is better if you only focus on a few channels where you can commit to rather than committing halfway through all of them.

Don’t follow everyone

This is most likely the hardest step of them all. Not all of the relationships you are going to build with social media will benefit you. Some relationships will never take off, and some will. No matter how hard you try or how many followers you have, if these aren’t targeted and in line with your goals, it might be time to seek new connections.

Don’t pull your hair out

Social media is not a race where you want to win around every turn. Whether you are managing the social media campaign for yourself or for someone else, it is vital that you remember that if you lose precious “fans” or followers, they weren’t really loyal to your brand or purpose. It is important that you build a targeted network of meaningful relationships with fewer “likes” and followers than a fake one with many. Quality over quantity!

Re-assessing your strategy

Not every social media campaign will be as successful as you hope it should be. Not every piece of content that you share will get responses. This is not a bad thing. Never be afraid to experiment. If something doesn’t work in your social media campaign, review and start again.

Social media marketing should be an ongoing effort. Don’t give up. If you are able to stick to the goals with your campaign, do the work, cut the noise, and enjoy it.

With your social media initiative, if your audience trusts your business they will most likely provide you with their contact details in order to obtain special offers and valuable content. This is not a big surprise as most digital marketers are using social media to gather leads. If you are interested in generating leads with your social media marketing campaign, do you have a strategy to accomplish this? A blind and naked approach to social media will not help you achieve this. Find below some tips that can help you generating leads with social media marketing.

Do you know your target audience?

Maintaining an active presence on various social media channels will not get you very far unless you understand the audience you are trying to reach. What is the point in posting random updates on Twitter if your target audience is not Twitter? The first step with any social media marketing campaign is to do some research and listen. On which social media channels does your audience spend most of their time on? What interests them? Do you know their demographics?

When you have done your research by listening then you will be able to build some brand awareness and trust on selected social media channels because you will understand the audience you are trying to reach. Most people don’t make instant purchase decisions so it is important to gain their trust first before they are likely to purchase.

What value can you offer your target audience?

By not providing your audience with interesting and valuable content can be one of the main reasons you won’t be able to build a following on Twitter or get people to like your page on Facebook. If you are just sharing content about how great your own products and services are, then most likely people will not engage with you. If someone begins following your brand on your social media profiles, they are looking at what value you can provide for them. Focus on “magnetic content” in the form of help content, guides, and special offers and your network will become more loyal to your brand.

There are thousands of social media channels that you can use to start engaging and build your brand reputation online. If you combine the number of users on all the social media channels you will be coming up with over a billion people who are active on the social web in total. With this said, social media is really a gold mine if you are into digital marketing.

With the growing trend of jumping on the social media bandwagon and to start building awareness for your brand, it is really not surprising to see digital marketers taking advantage of this opportunity to market their services and products via social media. Many of these digital marketers are failing because they didn’t create a plan or strategy when they started using Web 2.0 for marketing purposes.

The same with any type of digital marketing campaign, success depends on a good foundation consisting of a good execution plan. To help you get started with social media marketing, find below a couple of tips that can help you with the Web 2.0 marketing journey.

Research everything regarding SMM

Learn and research everything you can do about social media before you start with your campaign. Quite a few people are making the mistake of first starting their strategy with the technology in mind. A couple of weeks ago I published a blog post titled “The POST method with social media marketing” where I explain that your social media campaign should never start with the Technology in mind. POST stands for people, objectives, strategy, and technology.

Who do you want to reach? Where can these people be found? What are their demographics? Researching (listening) first will allow you to find ways on how you can market yourself on the social web without sounding like the desperate salesman.

Choose the right social media channels

Even though Facebook is the biggest social media channel, not all types of businesses can be marketed to on Facebook or Twitter. Some businesses needs a LinkedIn strategy more than a Facebook business page and vice versa. With this said, after you researched where your market is coming from and where you can reach them, you need to pick the social media channel that will help you reach them.

There is really no use in using Twitter, Facebook or even Pinterest if these channels are not appropriate for promoting your business.

 Always be honest and transparent

In social media, being transparent is your best policy. With social media you are dealing with real people. If they catch you being dishonest, your business can suffer greatly and you might not be able to contain their outrage. One single negative comment about you or your business can destroy your reputation.

The basic social media marketing tips above can help you get started using the social web to market and engage with targeted audiences.

If you can create magnetic content that catches the attention of the people you are interested to reach and they share the content with their own network and community, you have successfully produced magnetic content. This content is not always just “text” and it could be in the form of images, videos or just an infographic. In plain English: it is content you create to engage with people online.

Here’s a couple of reasons why you should focus on creating magnetic content.

Benefits of magnetic content

• Social media marketing: If you create magnetic content, it has the ability to go viral and be shared by many. This can also help you get more followers on your social media profiles.
• Branding: The more often your magnetic content is viewed, the more your brand will be exposed.
• Sales: At the end of the day, digital marketing is mostly about increasing sales. With magnetic content you can increase targeted traffic to your website, ultimately leading to sales.
• SEO: Magnetic content can increase your search engine rankings. The more your magnetic content gets shared, the more inbound links it can generate.
• Trust: When your magnetic content is shared, it is similar to receiving a  recommendation. This can help you build a trusted online reputation.

Time is the key with magnetic content

You don’t have to create and publish magnetic content everyday. Time is the key with magnetic content, as one piece of content starts fading in popularity, publish another piece. This will help you to keep your brand and business in front of people’s eyes. It can also make people talking about your business over a long period of time.

Creating magnetic content is not easy and it should always be created as an extension of your overall digital marketing campaign. If you have the budget, you can always outsource this to an agency with experience in creating this type of content. Most businesses outsource video content with the aim to make it go viral, and it makes perfect sense to do the same if you have an awesome idea for an infographic. There is also no reason why you shouldn’t outsource your blog or website text content if you are not comfortable with writing. Create magnetic content and your business will reap the rewards.

There’s no need to use a phone book anymore because the world-wide web made it easy for anyone to find answers to questions within seconds.  The internet not only helps us find what we are looking for, but it can also give us immediate recommendations and referrals from other people who have used the services or products from suppliers in the search results.

Even though this all sounds well and fine, this has opened up a whole new can of worms. With all the information available to us online, and because it is so easy for anyone to post and share anything with the world, it has become important to proactively manage your online reputation. Never make the mistake of thinking that if you haven’t listed your information on public websites or if you simply don’t have your own website that you are safe. There might be a chance that you are listed on some type of directory, and the information on there might not be accurate.

Your online reputation should be taken seriously and is not something you are going to do once and then forget about it. You need a process to actively monitor and take care of your online reputation. Here’s a couple of tips that can help you with starting a simple online reputation management process.

Online reputation management process

Google: Search for your business name and some variations people will use to find you on Google. You can also search for key employee names and see what is ranking on the first page of the search results.

Google Alerts: Setup Google Alerts for your company name, key employees, services, products, brand, etc. Create the alerts to notify you immediately via email for reputation management.

Online profiles: Check all the online profiles that you are active on such as your social media profiles and check if the data on your profile is correct. Update your profiles regularly and complete missing data. Also check for any incorrect information about your company on directories and business listing websites.

Monitoring: As soon as you are alerted that your name has been mentioned online, research where this has taken place and respond as soon as possible where necessary. Demonstrate that you are listening to your customers needs and that you care about what they have to say.

Local promoting: Search Google for businesses in your area to see which review websites and social media channels are having their comments pulled into the search results of Google. This can help you check for areas where you can list your business to get active reviews on.

Online reputation management is not a do it once and be done with it process. Manage your online identity proactively to ensure you don’t get blasted by negative feedback without your participation online.

Poor quality websites were hit earlier this year with another Panda update and recently spammy websites were hit with the Penguin update. The problem with the latest update (Penguin) is that it came directly after the last Panda update, so if you had a sudden drop in traffic to your websites, is it due to the spam update (Penguin) or the quality update of (Panda)?

Website analytics

If your website has suffered with rankings in the last couple of weeks and you don’t know which update affected your precious rankings, don’t fear. If you have Google Analytics or any other analytics software tracking your website traffic, have a look at the following dates to determine which update affected your website. On April 19 2012 the latest Panda update was released and on 24 April 2012 the Penguin update. If your website rankings suddenly dropped after 24 April you might have been affected with the Penguin (spam) update.

You don’t like spam? I think the spammers don’t like it either. What about spam on your website? Have you ever, even in the beginning of optimizing your website built a few dodgy links to your site? Have you ever paid for links? Do you have duplicate content on your website or blog? By duplicate content I mean do you have the same content on your website with multiple URL’s or copied content directly from other websites?

Google’s quality guidelines

Whether your website has been hit by the Panda or recent Penguin update, focus and make sure you adhere to the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to make sure your website won’t get affected to these updates. If you have been affected by these updates, fix and cleanup your website, and with luck, your website will appear in its original position of the search engine result pages (SERP’s).

Don’t get the wrong idea, Google is really not against SEO (Search Engine Optimization), just don’t over optimize your website or fall prey to nasty “Black Hat SEO” methods. These “Black Hat” methods might get you instant results, but will punish you in the long run.