Social Media Marketing

It is important to have a polished social media profile when beginning your social media marketing. Your profile is the branding of you and your business. You may think that social networking is just a way to connect with old classmates and relatives. On the contrary, social networking is building relationships with like minded people who may want to do business with you based on your common interests, their needs and wants or your needs and wants.

In order for your social media profile to work properly, you must have a fully completed social media profile including a complete Bio. You must include your username, some personal information to share, your company name and information. Make sure to fill in all the blanks, omitting information makes it difficult for others to relate to you.

Including keywords in your Bio helps others to find you when they are searching for something that you have in common. Choosing a keyword for your social media profile can be as easy as asking yourself, “if someone was looking for me or my product” what would they type in when doing a search? For Instance if your business specializes in property management, include the keyword property management in your bio to help drive new connections to you.

Adding your picture is one of the most important things you can do to complete your social media profile. Without your picture, you leave it up to the viewers imagination. You are like the person behind the curtain. People will find it hard to relate to you when you do not show yourself. Be sure that the picture is current. It should reflect what you look like now, not what you looked like back then. The photo does not have to be professional either. It is easy to upload a photo from your computer to crop and post to your social media profile. A great site I recommend is http://www.shrinkpictures.com. When converting your photo I recommend to covert it 100 pixels, this is a good size for all social media sites and remember to keep it simple, using no special image effects.

Using testimonials in your social media profile is a way to let people know that you’ve got credibility. When using your social media profile for LinkedIn, testimonials are viewed as recommendations, while Facebook has testimonial apps to use.

After completing the set up for your social media profile, you want to connect with liked minded people. Don’t be shy, engage with others. If it is someone’s birthday, say, “Happy Birthday!”. Be sure to keep your social media profile up-to-date. If something has changed at work or in relation to your business, update that information on your social media profile. Share helpful information by posting links to articles or blogs.

Your social media profile should be duplicate-able, for re-use on each social media networking site. Keeping a clear consistent message on every social networking site your a part of, gets you greater exposure and credibility. And finally, set up a time each week for your “Social Networking” time. This way, you can effectively manage your social media profile and the time you spend on it.

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I get asked all the time, do I prefer Facebook or MySpace for social media marketing?
The most popular answer you might give depends on who you are and what you are looking for.

Originally created in 2004 for Harvard Law students, and giving MySpace a one year start, Facebook has grown to more than 175 million active social media marketing users, with their fastest growth occurring within the last twelve months. Facebook has emerged to make the race to be number one a real competition.

MySpace has been described as a site directed toward younger users and accepted by people in the music, arts and entertainment industries for their social media marketing, including celebrities like Kim Kardashian who according to ibtimes.com prefers MySpace over Facebook.

MySpace artists benefit from the exposure and promotion while creating a connection to fans using this type of social media marketing. Users can discover new music and become friends with artists they like to stay up to date on and keep up with information on those bands. The artists have found this version of social media marketing an inexpensive way to build a following often long before they even have a recording contract.

Fans of MySpace love the ability to fancy up their home page with flash, slide shows, pictures and sound. Many former users have said this feature was unappealing or confusing and complained of too much advertising and the flashy customization gets in the way of the intent of social media marketing for most non-entertainment oriented businesses.

In contrast, Facebook does not currently offer any homepage customization. The advertising is limited and the approach might be considered to be more developer or business oriented. For example, Facebook allows users to create their own applications and possibly center all of their other social media marketing around their Facebook page (ie. Twitter, Digg).

Regardless of the audience, both sites are growing very rapidly and the question remains which one is going to stay? Both sites have their raving fans and their detractors. Will their specific differences and user preferences sustain each social networking site or will one grow faster to become the biggest internet tribe as described by Seth Godin? Only time will tell if Facebook can become one big tribe (entire internet population) or will user’s specific preferences continue to drive both sites?

I believe the right question to ask is not which one will survive, but rather based on my social media marketing targets, which site should I be on? What are your thoughts?

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Here is great video from Common Craft on Twitter.

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Tip #4: Re-purpose existing content

With taking care of customers, blogging, keeping up profiles on numerous social media sites, all while running a business, maintaining your online presence can quickly become overwhelming. Use tools like Twitterfeed to automatically Tweet content from an RSS feeds of your other blogs or sites, and Alterthingy, another tool that helps you aggregate and repost your content across the multiple sites, and profiles you need to maintain.

In addition, several blogs (Wordpress for example) are building Twitter widgets to be able to display your tweets (and others) on your blog, thus keeping the blog actively changing and a target for better search engine ranking and more active visits.

There are any number of other ways you can use Twitter for Business and this note really only scratches the surface of what is possible. As the popularity of Twitter grows so will the unique and inventive ways of using this innovative tool.

I hope you enjoyed this 4 part post on “How to Use Twitter for Business”

Happy Tweeting…

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Tip #3: Automation (wherever it is appropriate)

Reduce the time it takes you to research what is happening in the Twitterdom, speed up your own Tweeting, get yourself followed automatically, and build ranking faster and easier.   There are several automation type tools available to help build your Twitter for business presence without having to hire a back room full of people:

• TweetBeep –Set up alerts for various keywords, people, different attitudes, and links.

• Search.Twitter.com (used to be called Summize) – Search for your keywords, click a button and you have  a custom RSS feed that you can read via your favorite feed reader, or put on your Google or Yahoo home page. A synopsis available on what’s happening.

• Tweetlater – one of the more versatile tools related to Twitter. A quick list of services include; emailing a digest of Tweets (like TweetBeep), Pre-scheduling tweets to keep your tweet stream flowing, pre-saving Tweets or common snippets of tweets for faster Tweeting, Automating direct messages to people that follow you, setting up an auto-follow and  managing multiple Twitter Ids at the same time.

• Twitscoop – extends what search.twitter.com can do with both real-time searches of specific keywords as well as what the overall Twitterdom is talking about using (the Tweet Cloud). It also shows you the hot trends in the cloud.

• Twellow -  This is another research tool that extends Twitter for business use, Twellow searches people’s profiles or what they are Tweeting about under specific, predefined categories, or a general search.  Twellow will also show you geographically where people are Tweeting from in the US and Canada.

• Remember the Milk (RTM) – A real unique and cutting edge use of Twitter. RTM is a Task management service (set up reminders, tasks, things to do, etc.) for an individual or a small team or business. You can interact with Remember the Milk through Twitter. You simply follow the Twitter ID @rtm and then send it commands like retrieving your current tasks, adding new tasks, setting up automated reminders, even sending tasks to other Twitter users. This is a great adaptation of Twitter for business use.

Stay Tuned for the Last Part…

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