Bob Withers asked:


Social Media Marketing is the process of promoting your website or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.

Social Media Optimization has been defined as the process of refining a website (optimizing it) so that its awareness and content are easily spread through social mediums and online communities by users and visitors of the website.

Social Media Marketing is a great addition to any traditional SEO work that you do, but it’s not a substitute. It’s an excellent way to get people to come to your site to take a look at what you have to offer and it isn’t difficult to implement. It’s fast becoming one of the most effective ways of marketing online.

Social Media Marketing is the new buzzword online, and social media sites are becoming increasingly more popular. It’s a very effective way of attracting links to your site and is very cost effective when compared with paid advertising and other forms of online marketing. And the rewards can be much greater.

Social Media Marketing is a great way to build long term sustainable, natural social media traffic and search engine rankings. Social networking in particular, creates a conversation with your target audience, providing you the opportunity to virally market your website through the chatter that can be created.

Social Media is better than branding and customer service because of the interaction it provides with your customers. It does not provide instant results and it will take some time before you will realize its effectiveness; however, its power lies in its ability to engage the right kind of participants and is about maintaining your brand and your reputation.

Social Media Marketing provides an easy way to build back links but it certainly doesn’t replace making titles unique or setting up a good internal linking structure. Another way to view social marketing is as word of mouth, but at the speed of sound.

Social Media also afford the long-term opportunity for companies to develop and use online networks for providing information their customers find interesting, or amusing, or useful. Social media shouldn’t be about how many people you can engage, but about how engaged can you make those people.

It changes the dynamics of not only marketing but business and Social Media marketing campaigns can include a variety of components and platforms.

It’s important to remember you can’t simply launch a Social Marketing campaign and assume your target audience will find you and engage in a conversation. It takes time and effort to establish a relationship and eventually gain the trust of the target audience.

Social Media can help you achieve results, either directly, by delivering information that leads visitors to your site, or indirectly, if the links provided are found by the search engines and give your pages a boost in regular search engine rankings.

Social Media Marketing isn’t intended as a replacement for traditional marketing and is not the final frontier of marketing, as we know it, but offers many advantages to the Internet Marketer.



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Jonathan Mac asked:


Social media marketing is the very effective tool for marketing your products. There is no other alternative marketing strategy for social media marketing. Hence social media marketing is indispensable for any online business. Social media marketing needs a different approach when compared to the other online marketing strategies. For a social media marketing campaign to be successful, it is very much important to understand the tactics that work better. This article is all about the effective social media marketing tips.

1. Creating unique profiles in Social Networks

Social networking sites like myspace and facebook have great importance in business promotion. This part of social media marketing can get lots of traffic to your website along with building credibility among people worldwide. The social networks are now crowded with the online marketers and hence it is important to highlight your profile in the crowd. Though there are lots of customization options available in the social networking sites itself, it is always good to get some professional help for advanced customization. These social media marketing professionals will be able to provide you will very unique profiles which will get noticed by the social media crowd immediately.

2. Don’t try to sell anything in the Social Networks

Many social media marketers just advertise their products through their social media profiles. This is a wrong move. Social networks are for connecting to people and not for advertising the products, Hence your main motive in the social networks should be to connect to as many people as possible. The traffic to your website and the credibility to your services/ products will eventually increase as your networks grow.

3. Don’t leave any social media profiles unattended

Active participation is a basic necessity of any social media marketing campaign. Just creating some profiles in a handful of social media sites doesn’t do any good. You should post some content to the social media profiles frequently and make them look lively. Always remember the fact that Google crawls the profiles that are frequently updated. Moreover, the visitors of your profile will love to see many updates. You should also involve in activities like participating in polls, posting in forums, making comments and connecting with the people of similar interest.

Social Media marketing is a time consuming process and for the moment of truth it is really worth the time you spend. If you don’t have enough time for social media marketing in your tight schedule, there are professional social media marketers who are ready to help you. To the added advantage, these professional social media marketers can analyze your website and create the best marketing strategy. By paying them a nominal fee, you can just sit back and relax, watching your network grow along with the web traffic and business.



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Jennifer Fong asked:


If you dive into social media without making a plan, you’ll make more mistakes than you need to. After all, you don’t want to go through a social media identity crisis in front of all the world to see.

Before any social media marketing campaign, and online presence, is launched, you need to decide what it is you want to project. How will you position yourself? What is it that you want to say? Who is the audience that you’re trying to reach? Since social media functions at its best when used to create relationships, think about the community that you want to engage, and how you want to present yourself to that community, before you jump in.

Now this is NOT license to take 6 months to get involved with social media. Honestly, with the pace this is all moving, the rules will have all changed again in 6 months! But it does make sense to take some time to plan out who it is you’re trying to reach and how you want them to perceive you.

When I began my journey into social media, I had some very clear objectives. I wanted to connect with direct sellers and direct selling executives, and provide a forum for the discussion of how to integrate social media marketing into the direct sales industry. I believe that social media will revolutionize the way that direct sellers do business, and I want to have a voice in the conversation. Knowing that, I created a social media strategy that took advantage of social media tools to reach the people I wanted to reach, and made an effort to provide useful information to these people.

So here’s how I did it.

1. I was already on Facebook. I had built a group of friends, colleagues, etc., and once in a while I posted status updates and notes about my business. Most of the time, however, I just engaged the community through the sharing of information, pictures, etc, developing relationships and reigniting old connections.

2. On Facebook, I also set up a fan page for my business, set up and publicized an application where users could send virtual gifts of our products to one another, and created “flair” with our company logo that I sent out to friends. We publicized opportunity calls through our fan page, and highlighted our charitable work here too. I taught our distributors how to use these tools to build their businesses.

3. I began checking Google Analytics for the traffic our company website received from Facebook. We are able to see where web traffic is coming from, and to see how long those visits last, what pages they are looking at, etc. As I’ve mentioned before, Facebook began to consistently rank among the top 5 referrers to our website, with a visit length of 3-5 times the length of any other referrer. The pages that were most visited were our product and opportunity pages.

4. I enhanced my professional profile on LinkedIn, since I was going to begin actively using it. I joined groups on LinkedIn that were relevant to my industry.

5. In January 2009, I began this blog. I researched on the web the discussions going on about social media and direct sales (there isn’t much, unfortunately) and began to add my voice to the discussion. I published all posts to my LinkedIn profile, to my Facebook profile, and to LinkedIn groups that I had joined that were relevant to the direct sales industry. People began commenting on my blog posts, as well as in the LinkedIn groups. I have tried to personally respond to all commentors, in order to continue to develop the relationship.

6. I joined Twitter, and began to try to figure out the tool. I observed more than I posted at first, in order to understand the cadence and the unspoken rules, and slowly began to add to the discussion. I searched for direct sellers and began following them. Many began following me back. I also began to follow giants in the social media world, so I could learn from them. All the while, I tried to add my thoughts about direct selling and social media, as well as helping out people in any ways I could, with all of my knowledge, whether related to direct sales/social media or not. I quickly learned that even with the little I know, I know more than some others about certain things, and so I am generous in my sharing of information. I also take the time to read the profiles and personally respond to those people that begin to follow me. It helps me to better understand what will help my followers.

As a result of this strategy, I have had the great pleasure of connecting with many well-respected leaders in my field, and have helped many people with their businesses. I am learning a GREAT deal, and believe that I am helping to lead my industry into its future with social media marketing. For me, this is greatly satisfying.

I share this strategy with you today because I think it’s important to really think through what you want to project, in order to make the most effective use of social media tools. I am learning everyday how to do this better, and I think that the leaders in social media marketing are constant students. Social media is a great big networking pool, and when you jump in with just a little bit of preparation, you will develop relationships that are beneficial, and that enable a flow of information that positions you as a giver as well as a receiver.

Has this post helped you? I would love to hear how it has, and also how you have crafted your own social media strategy. Let’s learn from each other!

For more articles on this and other topics related to social media marketing and direct sales, visit my blog at liajen.wordpress.com.



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Bob Withers asked:


The most recent phenomenon to hit the Internet Marketing scene in recent years is another form of Internet Marketing in its own right called Social Media Marketing. While Social Media Marketing has the capability to drive hordes of targeted traffic to your website there are still some pitfalls involved which you should try to avoid, at all costs, if you want to be successful with your Social Media Marketing campaign.

First of all one of the major targets of Social Media Marketers are the social media websites themselves, for example, MySpace and Facebook. In order to target and market to these sites you have to join and attract friends to your profile page. The first thing to avoid after joining is becoming involved with any of the software available which allows you to send mass invitations to certain groups you may have targeted inviting them to be your friends.

Everyone in the group receives a generic message inviting them to be your friend. If the site owner or webmaster discovers you are using this software you could be banned for life or, at the very least, have your membership suspended for a period of time. This can result in giving you a bad reputation within this community and make it very difficult to build any type of trusting relationship you need to establish for your future marketing activities on this site.

Another pitfall to be avoided is related somewhat to the first demonstrating how any type of news, good or bad, travels fast within these social media networks. When you approach your Social Media Marketing campaign and any of these social media websites you have to do so with the right attitude. By saying this I mean you have to be open and honest about your intentions. You have to be Transparent.

If you try to deceive any of your social networks it will usually come back to haunt you which can, again, result in a tarnished if not trashed reputation within these internet communities. A wise Internet Marketer once told me, when it comes to Internet Marketing the more you give, the more you receive. This brings us to a third pitfall which, if not avoided, can stall your Social Media Marketing campaign as if it were mired in quicksand. And this is, always be available and eager to offer help and advice.

But don’t offer advice if it’s not requested. If you are available to answer a Blog or forum question for someone who is stuck in a particular situation and needs help then by all means try to help. This will pay big dividends later on when needed because your reputation will precede you which, in this case, will be a good thing.

A fourth and final pitfall has to do with knowing who you are approaching. In other words you wouldn’t take a trip to Singapore without doing a little preparation and study about the culture and practices of these particular people. You should take the same approach when planning your social media campaign. If you’re approaching communities such as Facebook or MySpace, learn the proper etiquette and above all try not to offend anyone.

Especially try not to offend anyone who wields any kind of influence or power over the other members of the community. This too can result in a quick death for your Social Media Marketing campaign. If you approach your promotion with these four pitfalls in mind and put in the necessary planning and preparation as you would with any marketing campaign then you will be much more likely to encounter success with your social media strategy.



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