Social Media Marketing: A Must for All Businesses Today

Social media is the new media marketing; in fact, the trend towards social media marketing, in many companies, has become a favorite tactic along with traditional print and broadcast advertising.

To maximize your social media marketing efforts, you can:

1. Take a class to learn which social media outlets exist and target the ones that are most likely to give you the best return on investment. There are thousands of social media blogs, forums and other community outlets. While Facebook and Twitter are the biggest, there are thousands of other niche blogs and social media outlets that may be perfect for marketing your products.

2. Don’t try to do all things-social media. There are a bevy of ways to market your business via social media. Unless you have a team dedicated to manning everything from Twitter to Facebook to all the industry blogs you submit to, you’ll overwhelm yourself just trying to keep up. Pick 3-5 social media outlets and put your all into marketing to those audiences.

3. DO put your all into marketing on the social media platforms you like best. Try to avoid gathering a slew of Facebook Fans only to disappear once you reach your quota. Offer special incentives, something extra to those people. Give them a reward for helping make your social media marketing a success. To be a successful social media marketer, you have to be authentic and experimenting with a variety of messaging to test what works best.

4. Audit your social media efforts. Track what people are saying about your brand with tools like Google alerts. These automated tracking tools can give you “live” marketing intelligence to improve your brand and product offerings.