What has always been the most effective way to generate new business? Referrals from existing customers with their friends and families.
Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive & most productive form of advertising. Most people tune out traditional method of advertising. Only 1 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a positive return on investment. No-one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers can make a purchasing decision using the input of friends and family.
Social media marketing supplies the electronic platform for word of mouth marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The common Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets go out every week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more prevalent today through social media marketing than any other time in the history of business. Can your organization afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?
If you’re like me, you study from making mistakes. However, if you can learn from the mistakes of others, then you will achieve success quicker. 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 plan:
I’ll figure it out as I go- the largest time waster is going into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take the time to get educated on social networking sites. Not all sites are designed for businesses. Also, once you learn a site, learn all the benefits of the website. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will result in many companies abandoning their plan and walking from the strategy. Instead, learn the fundamentals of setting up these site, understand the various options, and spend your time engaging instead of fixing problems. There are good online educational programs out there 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 venture out and create a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at once. But the problem with this particular strategy is that should you grow too fast, you won’t be able to keep up with all the great things about each site. The best approach is to create one site, like Facebook, learn the details and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and engage with others. If you start up 12 at once, you will not be as active as well as your insufficient participation could defeat your current goal. It’s better to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social networking sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.
Profiles don’t matter- users of social media 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 site. If they find your site and you have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will most 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 largest stumbling block for some beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This sort of media is a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and trying to imitate these ineffective methods on a fresh medium will yield the same failed results. Instead of selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself being an expert in the field where you are practicing. For example, if you are an agent, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to market a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of individuals will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you’ll become an expert on the subject. Then, when the reader is ready to sell his or her 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 each day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. Assuming you have a blog one 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 will achieve.
Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media marketing activity. This doesn’t mean that you must make posts multiple times each day. But if your goal is to make 30 Facebook posts per month, you’ll find it’s easier to have 1 post per day than 3 days with 10 posts.
Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to truly have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I would use to talk to people. Needing to log into multiple accounts every day to check the emails became annoying, frustrating, and ineffective. The fact is, it became to frustrating to get this done and I hardly ever used my email. However, once I learned to load most of my email accounts into Outlook, I was able to 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 from 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 enable you to log into all of 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 a few good all-in-one social media marketing dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social media efforts.
In Luxury Travel Tip , if you are a small business owner looking to create a social media 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 create a house and you don’t have a hammer, that house isn’t likely to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in this article, it will be possible to quickly and effectively create & implement your own profitable social media plan.