Social Media Marketing in 2012 – Are You Prepared?

The regular Dos, the onetime Dos and Don’ts

Social Media Marketing Usage Statistics

As you see, majority of businesses agree with the fact that social media marketing is important for their business promotion. Obviously 93% of the businesses out there are involved into social media marking in some form. With these statistics, it is clear that you landed on this news post because you are one among the 93% of businesses using social media for promotion.

 

Social media marketing this year had expanded a lot beyond the “feisty 3” – Face book, twitter and linked in. However, we feel linked in falling out of internet marketing lead, focusing more to business networking. The gap is filled by the new comer Google +. Though the social media sites and networks have grown all over like mushrooms, none of them were able to make a mark as the top 3 sites did.

Regular Dos 

Social media is not all about twitter, face book and Google plus. However, this doesn’t mean that you have to enter deep into each and every social media site which is available today. Identifying your possible social media interaction lets you decide which social networks are to be added to your regular social media promotion list.

For example, being an SEO company, we cannot add flickr to our regular social media marketing list though we can manage to put together pictorial representation of our services.Those images don’t go viral through any of the image sharing social networks. Our regular social media marketing efforts should be on social media sites where we can share informative content such as blogs, status updates, social groups etc. 

                                                                                                           

For Regular Social Media Marketing, include:
Face book Wall Updates + Tweets + Google Plus Stream posts (Make sure you are posting unique information across these 3 sites).
Don’t just stop there. Identify the social media stuff that you can generate and pick top 10 other targeted social media spots. For example, if you are promoting a travel website, you should be adding social video sharing sites and social photo site.

One Time Do’s:

As already said, social media is not just carrying countable number of sites today. Based on our research at SIM labs, there are about 600 social media sites where you need to have your business presence. This is not mainly for social media marketing, but to secure your brand identity in these social media spots. There are several third party social media name check services available to know the open spots for your brand.  Consider this activity as brand reputation management; this is a onetime process. Create fully completed profiles in the social media sites and forget them.

Never Do’s in social media marketing

Don’t get into all the social media sites and social networks just because everyone else does. As said earlier, identify your target social audience and pick the spots to promote. Another main thing not to do with social media marketing is; not to promote your brand every time. Remember that social media marketing is entirely different from SEO or any other conventional internet marketing. You cannot just drop links on each and every post or action you make within the social media sites. You will have to really dedicate your time to present the audience with something really useful to them (which includes interesting information without any motive of promotion in it).

So here is the checklist for social media marketing

• Identify the top 20 social networks suitable for niche where the target audience is present. Add them to the regular maintenance list along with face book, twitter and Google Plus.
• Secure your brand identity, user names and vanity url's with all the 600 bets social media sites. Create fully completed profiles even if it takes time because this time invest me is just one time
• As you will have only around 25 social media sites to maintain if the ideas in this article are followed, allocate at least 2 hours a day for social media marketing. Post information; get involved with the fan network by commenting to their posts and encouraging them.

 
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