Five Solid Tips For Social Media Marketing

My buddies at Infusionsoft posted this great blog post and I wanted to provide the content for our readers because it ROCKS!

Here are five solid insider tips that will help you make your business more social, connect with customers, energize fans and attract prospects:

Track Your Blog with Google Analytics – If you’re starting out your blog, it’s a good idea to measure the traffic with free website tracking provided by Google Analytics. You’ll discover useful data like bounce rates, time on site, trends and a lot of helpful data that serves as feedback. That helps us see how you use our blog, what you like and helps me make decisions about the blog. Nothing invasive — it’s aggregate data — individual privacy is still upheld.

Social Media Strategy: Identify Your Goals – I know this is beating a dead horse but it’s so crucial. Spend at least a few moments thinking about what you actually want from your small business’ social media activities. Sometimes it’s revenue; sometimes it’s entertaining discussion; sometimes it’s brand and buzz building; sometimes it’s customer service. It can be any (or none) of these and that’s perfectly fine. Knowing the goals, the strategy can be developed without too much Tylenol. For a few ideas, Dosh Dosh suggestssocial media goals to aim for.

Be Involved and Discover Your Community – Online communities are a powerful way to connect with leaders in your space. Communities frequently rally around a narrow set of topics and causes and people identify with each other. This helps weed out the interference and make connections that matter. Forums are popular, Tweet-Chats are growing in popularity, Facebook Community Pages may be next. A good example of online community that I referred to is Warrior Forum for entrepreneurs and Internet marketers.

You Can Be Great at Social Media and Not Use Twitter – In response to a question was about “What do you tell a business owner who doesn’t use Twitter to use Twitter?” This gives rise to the sense of overwhelm among business owners and I cant blame them. I made it a point that you don’t need to use Twitter to effectively use social media. Sure, it has 93 million users, over a billion Tweets, but it’s still only one channel to listen and engage with others. Here’s that Twitter Guide for Small Business that Twitter published for small business owner I mentioned during the show.

Think Critically – but Optimistically – About Your {Insert Social Media Device Here} – In this case, I picked on blogs, but it applies to any activity in social media. Gather the data, use the data to help ascertain conclusions and always work to improve the results. It helps to measure your content in context to “useful” (e.g., Wikipedia) and “interesting” (e.g., TMZ) so you can create awesome content. Exercising disciplined optimism in your social media activities is crucial – you won’t have overnight success, but you should be seeing results as you are consistently pushing out great content that engages, helps and inspires people.

 

Now it’s your turn – Go to work!

Jean-Guy (JG) Francoeur
Author, Answers You’re Aching To Know

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