How to make a good Social Media Marketing Strategy

Start with your Goals

Before you can create a strategy, you need to specify what you wish to accomplish with social media marketing.

Here are some common goals to give you an idea:

Increase brand awareness
Learn more about your target audience
Educate and inform customers
Improve customer service
Monitor brand reputation

This list could go on forever, but you’ve got the idea. Don’t start your social media campaign until you’ve clearly established and made a written record of these goals.

Create a Strategy Based on Research

Blindly jumping into social media is a terrible mistake that may create major setbacks. You must spend time doing detailed research and creating solid strategies that will enable you to reach your goals.

The research process includes but is not limited to:

Determining if your target audience is online or offline
Examining the successes and failures of other social media campaigns
Creating realistic timelines
Establish a method for tracking results

Once you’ve done all this research, you can start building the actual path (strategy) for reaching your goals.

Build Relationships

At the end of the day, social media is all about building relationships. This means you don’t just show up on the social network of your choice blasting your marketing message. That wont get the job done. It actually mite make everyone dislike you. You have to treat social media users just like you would people in real life. Get to know them, interact without promoting, help each other out. Only then can you start to achieve your goals.

Create a Schedule

Tweeting, blogging, or posting on forums haphazardly isn’t a social media strategy. You need to set up an actual schedule. Not only will this help you stay committed and on task, but creating a social media schedule also improves your campaign’s efficiency. You’ll no longer be wasting time making up your strategy as you go.

Stay on Course

Many times companies view social media as a quick fix, but the reality is social media is a marathon not a sprint. Remember, it’s about building relationships. This requires constant connections over a long period of time, just like any other relationship. You can’t expect to gain valuable insight, increase brand awareness, or build relationships with people who will help promote your content in a matter of days. Stick with it!

Measure the Results

How you measure success depends on which goals you’re trying to achieve. For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness and to maintain a positive reputation, you can track results by using conversation discovery techniques. Whether this is setting up Google Alerts for any time your brand is mentioned or paying a company to do it for you, the point is that you need to have a strategy for monitoring your results. By taking the guesswork out of your social media monitoring, you can see exactly how your campaign is performing.

Make the Right Tweaks

Now that you have a strategy in place for monitoring your progress, it’s time to start tweaking your campaign for maximum efficiency. For example, if your goal is building links and you see you aren’t gaining any back links, you might need to alter the style of your content. Or perhaps you need to promote it differently (maybe you’re promoting it with the wrong social media sites.) The point is if your strategy just isn’t working (assuming you’ve given it time to work,) you need to make some changes. No one achieves perfection on their first try, it requires constant fine-tuning.

FB Maxed

Facebook is the largest social media platform online today. It is also a way to market anything you want to market whether you are looking to sell products, promote affiliate products, market yourself, etc.

FB Maxed takes a plain Facebook fan page and turns it into something spectacular. There are three templates included; giving you a fully functional Facebook page.

It is hard to create an attractive fan page on Facebook without help from someone who knows how to create and implement templates into the fan page. FB Maxed gives everyone who has a fan page the opportunity of having something better than just something plain and boring.

There are webinars and recorded videos to help anyone input the templates step-by-step into their Facebook fan page. No technical skills are required to use FB Maxed.





FB Maxed is an easy, customizable system to make integrated pre-made templates into your fan page. Based on reviewing the product, Daniel Tan says you can integrate functional websites into your fan page as long as the website is hosted on your own server.

What you can have on your Facebook page are HTML5 videos, photo galleries, a lead capture page, landing pages, multiple pages, and more. You can even build in an ecommerce page into your fan page.

FB Maxed gives people the opportunity to do business a lot easier with the customizable pages. It is also compatible with Facebook Mobile where your page can be seen on various phone platforms like iPads, iPhones, iPods, Androids, and other platforms.

Click Here for more info about FB Maxed.

FollowerHub Review

FollowerHub.com provides follower and friend discovery and management services for twitter users.



With Followerhub you can:

Manage Multiple Accounts

Manage all your friends and followers of all your social networking accounts on Twitter and Google Buzz

No need to log in and out of several accounts (One central interface in one FollowerHub account)

Powerful Searching (Create as many searches as you need, each with simple or complex search criteria)

Review and decide on one page for all accounts

Automatically put new followers on all accounts into one group & easily decide to follow or block

Mix Twitter & Buzz people into the same group

Define as many groups as you need

Easily segment your search matches, friends & followers

Click Here for more info about FollowerHub

TweetAdder Review

TweetAdder is a Twitter management tool that automates building followers and managing incoming and outgoing direct messages. TweetAdder offers free upgrades for life. Because its a download, there is no shipping cost.

TweetAdder is an inexpensive and smooth-working Twitter management tool. It can easily add 50-150 new followers to your account every day. And it is done without upsetting other users.
They have a few basic tutorials, which really are unnecessary. Provided that you have an understanding of Twitter, then you'll use this tool often and easily.

 

Initial setup takes just a couple of minutes. Once you download and install, simply enter your twitter username/password and you can log-in to the program. Once you're in, then you can begin following new users.

Search for like-minded users with 5 criteria:
 Profile information
 Location
Content of tweets
 Followers of another user
 Users followed by another user

 While this is automated, you still have full control of who to follow, how long to wait before you unfollow non-responsive users and what you'll say in your direct messages.

If you are interested in increasing the amount of people who read your tweets, then this is a great tool. Because the program will automatically follow people with similar interests to yours and your tweets, then you can build a responsive following. To do this on your own, it would easily take a few hours every day.

  Click Here for more info about TweetAdder. 

Hootsuite Review

In this era of too many places to post to, too many jobs to be done, and even with the most efficient multi-tasker there are not enough hours in the day. Hootsuite is a savior. Hootsuite is a web based application containing an entire set of tools to manage, track, analyze and schedule your social network media campaigns.

Not only does this web application let the user post to multiple social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin and more, it helps to schedule tweets and updates their status. If fans and followers should be updated about a blog update for tomorrow, the tweet or shout can be scheduled today.

Hootsuite even has a browser plug-in so that one or many social network accounts can be posted to on the fly while browsing the web. Just one click and any content can be shared and all without leaving the browsing session or going to another site to post or Tweet.

When a business uses a social networking team to interact on their various media it is a simple matter to assign responsibilities and track activities using Hootsuite. There is even an iPhone app in the works to further simplify tracking results and using Hootsuite from any place the marketer can use their phone.



You might find yourself to be using Hootsuite more often than logging into your Twitter account.
Two important streams on HootSuite are a “Keyword Stream” and a “List Stream” . Why create a stream for a keyword? Simple. When you watch the “Keyword Stream“, you will see all of the tweets people have made on Twitter about that keyword. The keyword tweets will also include people you may not be following. For instance, let’s say you sell Baby Slings. Set up a “Keyword Stream” for Baby Slings. Watch the stream. Someone may send out a tweet asking about Baby Slings. There is an opportunity to jump on, reply to the person and tell them about your Baby Sling product along with a link to your product in the tweet. (If you don’t have time to constantly watch twitter, you can always check the “Keyword Stream” and reply to tweets at a convenient time) In addition to a Keyword Stream, I find my “List Stream” to be just as important. I create a “List Stream” to keep up with important contacts I have through Twitter. I like to Re-Tweet good info/tweets I find from my “List Stream” .

Click Here for more info about Hootsuite

Facebook Marketing

Without a doubt, Facebook is the most innovative of all the social networking sites today. So innovative, that it's almost as if the site introduces new applications and features everyday to allow people to interact among each other in more creative ways.

For your Facebook Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategies to be as effective as possible, you need to be up-to-date with the fast-paced developments on the site and know exactly how you can exploit new opportunities to your advantage.

I will be posting many strategies and tools for Facebook Marketing (and other SMM strategies) in the near future, so stay tuned.

SocialOomph Review

What is SocialOomph?

SocialOomph is an automation tool that provides Twitter users the ability to set up tweets to be automatically posted at set time intervals. It is entirely based online and allows you to manage one or multiple Twitter accounts. It also supports other social networking accounts including FaceBook and MySpace. SocialOomph also allows you to incorporate RSS feeds into your social networking accounts.



More Info:

Whether you are sending tweets to one Twitter account or you are incorporating multiple Twitter accounts with your FaceBook or MySpace account SocialOomph charges a monthly fee of slightly under $30 per month. There is also a free version of SocialOomph available which many users find sufficient for their needs. The free version of SocialOomph does have restrictions that often make it challenging for those who are actively using Twitter for marketing purposes.


There are many options for automating your Twitter and FaceBook accounts using SocialOomph. They include:

Direct messages - You can set up direct messages to automatically send to new followers on Twitter
RSS Feeds - You can set up RSS feeds easily from the SocialOomph dashboard for automatically sending new blog posts
Automatic following/un-following - You can choose to have all those who follow you automatically followed back using SocialOomph. You can also also elect to un-follow all who un-follow you
Automatic listing - If you are using lists in Twitter, you can also instruct SocialOomph to add people to the list

Click Here for more info about SocialOomph

 

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks.

Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:

Website traffic and user behavior (external and internal tracking)
Conversion and sales tracking
Page views, ad exposure
Growing brand awareness
Business development
Lead Generation

Since the social web allows you to interact with others, create and promote content that can get links and viral attraction, you can (with the right strategy) reach key influencers using it. We all know what blogs alone can do, and they are pretty search engine friendly out of the box.

Social media expansion is important because this provides foundations for broader / faster mindshare, along with supporting your search engine marketing objectives. You can convert traffic if you target it appropriately and don't spam.