What has always been the simplest way to generate new business? Referrals from existing customers to their friends and families.
Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive and most productive form of advertising. A lot of people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only 1 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a confident return on investment. No one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers will make a purchasing decision in line with the input of family and friends.
Social media marketing provides the electronic platform for referral marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and is linked to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets venture out each 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 history of business. Can your company afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?
If you’re like me, you learn from making mistakes. However, when you can study from the mistakes of others, then you will achieve success quicker. So why not study from the mistakes of others? Here are several common mistakes new marketers make when attempting to create and implement a social media marketing plan:
I’ll figure it out when 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 networking sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all of the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will result in many business owners abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the basics of setting up these site, understand the various options, and spend your time engaging instead of fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs on the market that can 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 very best approach would be to create one site, like Facebook, learn the details and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, participate in events, and build relationships others. If you set up 12 at once, you will not be as active as well as your lack of participation could defeat your current goal. It’s better to have one or two 2 completely utilized social media 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+, many people will find you before they find your website. If Premium Vacation Packages find your website and you have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile is your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most of all, 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 kind of media is really a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and trying to imitate these ineffective methods on a new medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Instead of selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself being an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For instance, if you are an agent, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to sell a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of individuals will act on do-it-yourself content. By providing valuable information, you will become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell their house, they will probably ask for your services.
Same approach to communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people like to read, others like video, plus some people will be attracted to pictures on your site. The main element is to mix up how you post. If you to put it simply out a blog every day, your followers will become blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. If you have a blog 1 day, then put up a simple video another. 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 must make posts multiple times each day. But if your goal would be to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, you’ll find it’s easier to have 1 post each day than 3 days with 10 posts.
Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I’d use to communicate with people. Needing to log into multiple accounts every day to check the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The truth is, it became to time consuming to get this done and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load all of my email accounts into Outlook, I could efficiently check and make use of 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 that may allow you to log into all your social media makes up about interactions may be the easiest way to ensure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are several good all-in-one social media marketing dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social media efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner looking to create a social media marketing plan for your business, then you absolutely should learn how to use the technology and find tools to assist you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to build a house and you don’t possess a hammer, that house isn’t likely to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in this posting, it will be possible to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media plan.