Social Media Marketing (SMM) is all about the medium and the medium is a vehicle that amplifies social behavior. SMM is another form of advertising in which you can reach your target audience in a convenient, fast, and inexpensive manner. With the use of all the Web 2.0 channels available, a small business entrepreneur can really afford to promote their products and services on the web in a social manner.
The secret to social media marketing success is focus. It is very important to look at your business objectives and see how you can integrate social media into your business to help those objectives meet their goals. Not all of your website visitors will buy a product or service from you. So instead of making “website traffic” your main goal, with social media you can create your own community and audience that are interested in what you offer and what you say. This can automatically drive “website traffic”.
Social media marketing campaign
Before you start with any social media marketing campaign, it is very important that you understand the characteristics of social media, its strengths and weaknesses. This will help you determine which social media channels you will be targeting and to what extent you should engage with people on the various channels to build a following. There are thousands of social media channels available. If your aim is to generate sales leads, LinkedIn may prove more beneficial to you than sites such as Digg or Flickr.
Earn trust and credibility with your campaign
Another important element of SMM is earning trust and credibility on all the profiles you are going to use. This means that you must deliver exactly the service or product your promised. If you are using a blog to promote your services, an optimized title and description of your blog post must be supported by informative and useful content. Readers will not read what you are saying if you have poor content stuffed with irrelevant keywords and links.
Social media marketing is an excellent way for businesses to start engaging with their target audience online and to build credibility and trust.
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“So instead of making “website traffic” your main goal” It can be so tempting to just want to drive traffic, but it’s the relationships and engagement that creates value. When people find value they will come back , and that’s traffic. Nice article, Thanks Anton
Thanks Deon. Everyday I see companies focusing only on generating “website traffic”. It is the same as advertising in a general magazine hoping someone will notice your advertisement. Targeted traffic is king in the digital marketing world.
Well put Anton,
Have you ever heard of BizBrag? I would be interested to get your take on the platform.
Very interesting concept, but how does it differ from channels such as Squidoo?
Well in quite a few ways. Squidoo is essentially a blogging platform. We offer that with our Braggits plus:
1. Posting the content to your social media immediately when it’s created.
2. Monitoring all interaction with your posts on social media from our dashboard (we pull in likes, comments, retweets, etc.)
3. Providing you with analytics data for all of your posts. (pageviews, bounce rate, likes/tweets/shares/+1’s, etc.)
4. Allowing you to connect with other businesses and have your content posted to their social networks, which increases your reach exponentially.
Forgot to mention: You know that you are targeting potential customers because the businesses you connect with are local and complimentary.