Social media marketing is a key driver of relationship building, content distribution, and brand visibility online; and for most businesses, the major social media marketing platforms are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Plus.
Your intial focus when getting involved with social media should be to establish connections, build relationships, and engage in conversations with customers, prospects and your community of advocates.
To Find Long-term, Sustainable Social Media Success, Build an Engaged and Loyal Audience First.
As you develop a following on social media, you can share links to your own content via your social media accounts, in order to drive traffic to your website.
According to a recent Business.com survey, 55% of Buyers Search for Information on Social Media. Your customers are there, your competition is there, your employees and new hires expect it — your business needs to include social media. Here are the major players:
LinkedIn is a very useful tool for most business people to: research and connect with prospective clients, expand your business network, identify and connect with new hires and business partners, build awareness of your company, announce product or service offerings, position your company in the marketplace, and keep tabs on the competition. B2B companies are more likely to acquire customers through LinkedIn.
Twitter is one of the most powerful social networks for your business, and CEOs who tweet tend to be held in high regard. Twitter can be used to drive traffic to your website, monitor your brand on Twitter, promote events and online conversations about them, establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, and expand your network.
Facebook serves as a powerful platform for building a community of advocates and increasing word-of-mouth marketing, particularly among B2C companies in the retail industry.
Google+ has started to affect social media marketing, and is becoming increasingly integrated with search engine rankings as well. Within six months of its launch, over 40% of marketers consider Google Plus “useful,” “important” or “critical.” Optimize your business presence on Google+ by sharing photos, recommending links, segmenting your messages among different audiences, publishing remarkable content and enabling video conferencing on the platform.
By teaching your audience, entertaining them, or providing a resource to share with their friends, you create value; you build trust.
RIM Specializes in Search Engine Marketing: Blogging, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, PPC Advertising, Web Analytics and Other Internet-Based Marketing Strategies to Help Your Business Get Found, Generate Leads, Build Relationships and Measure Results.