Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Social Media Marketing Suggestions Your Business Needs To Succeed

By Dona Barbagallo


A business must stay up with current marketing trends in order to both survive and grow. Social media marketing represents the new frontier. Read this article to learn more about social networking and how it could benefit your business.

If you want to use social media in your marketing plans, you need to cope with negativity about it. Of course, you want your followers to post positive comments about you, but this is not going to always happen. You must be prepared to handle the negative ones as well. Do not ignore it; instead help those who are unsatisfied.

You can now link all your blog posts to LinkedIn. When you post articles, they will show as being updated on LinkedIn. You can save time in this way, and you will get greater exposure by posting to both LinkedIn and to your blog.

Your website should always be linked together with any social media profile. This can be done by adding buttons on your site that will let your customers share your content via their own social profiles. You should include these buttons on your main web pages, blog posts, and RSS feeds to make it easy for your visitors to share your content.

Social media marketing is a very popular technique, but that is not a reason to jump in feet first with no guiding plan. This is the time you should utilize to learn about SMM, how to become known, target an audience, and construct some form of it offline. If you plan out your strategy and take advantage of the opportunity, it can only increase your chances for success.

Listen carefully to what your followers and customers have to say. Always thank your followers for their feedback and clarify their concerns by asking follow-up questions. Take notes on feedback that you receive, and you might notice recurring comments, which you can use.

Study how your traffic changes with different techniques. Do not let very good or very bad days lead you astray. It is, however, important that you are able to see a trend in traffic and realize when it is time to move to your next option.

The word you need to focus on in social media marketing is "social." So before you start ignoring people, remember that your customers actually want to speak with a real person. When a customer makes a suggestion, you can safely assume that others share their opinion. Let them know you are paying attention to what they are telling you.

In order to get the best results from social media marketing, use your customer's demographic information to your advantage. If you can establish that those people accessing your site are part of a specific demographic group, you will be able to design advertisements to specifically target them.

Social media networks can be a powerful way to help with company branding. Use your company logo as your avatar or background for your profile pages. Utilize consistent color schemes across all of your social media profiles. Customers and followers will identify with you in this way, and will trust the various sites if they can see the connection easily. Branding should be an important strategy.

If you have a blog or a site, you need to ensure that people can subscribe to it easily. The subscribe button should never be out of site and always be made available and easy to click on. Instead, put it right near an important piece of content, as this will draw readers' eye your subscription link. Also, remember that some consumers are working with a slower Internet connection, and you want to make it possible for them to see the subscribe button as quick as possible.

Automate YouTube for social media marketing success. If you have a YouTube account and post videos to it, you will need to set it up to auto-post. This way, you can easily get it to your outside business social websites. This can simply be done by going to account settings and picking the services you want automatically included in your posts.

Have your customers take a survey in order to find out what their social media habits are. If large bases of your followers utilize social media sites, than it is a wise idea to create your own social media site designed specifically for your brand. On the other hand, if your customer base reports little interest in social networking sites, your marketing time may be better spent elsewhere.

Social media marketing success takes time so be patient. It will take some time to glean a base of follower that will significantly increase your business. If your techniques seem to be failing, reevaluate the specific methods that are not leading to success.

Use automation techniques on your Twitter account. Automation can easily be set up to include auto-tweets from blog posts of other people. When you are searching for blogs to use, make sure that they provide valuable and credible information. This keeps your page fresh while satisfying your followers who are interested in reading good content.

Take note of the time slot when re-tweets and responses to your tweets occur most frequently on Twitter. Use what you learn from that to figure out when to send out messages. Regardless of how it fits into your own schedule, you want to send your tweets when the largest numbers of followers are likely to see them. An automated service can help you launch your messages in this ideal window.

This will change your perceptions of social media marketing. There are more uses for these sites than just playing games or posting something clever in 140 characters. This is a medium that provides an all-new and exciting audience for your services. I hope that this article gives you all the information you need to capitalize on the many benefits of social media marketing. Start by creating a few profiles and writing good content.




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