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Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith Become an Author

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Tweets, Facebook wall writings, LinkedIn or Google+ posts are now part of the marketing mix for small businesses to Fortune 100 firms. Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube just to name a few have experienced exponential growth during the last couple of years according to the continued steam of published research.

Depending upon your own target market, if your business is not including social media in your marketing action plan then you may be missing a significant opportunity to increase awareness, attraction attention and begin to build those critical relationships necessary to increase sales. One reason these social networks have taken off is because they are engaged in formal and informal education based marketing.

Learning research continues to reaffirm that people learn best from each other (informal learning). And with the doubling to probably even tripling of information, finding those resources that can help the buyer begins to build levels of trust. Since people buy first from people they know and trust, social media appears so to speak to be a "no-brainer."

If you decide to add social media to your marketing mix in your efforts to increase sales, these quick tips may help you:

1. Determine what sites have the greatest value to your. Facebook is more about business to retail (B2R) or business to consumer (B2C) while LinkedIn is more about business to business (B2B). Twitter can be used in all three arenas. YouTube is the number two search engine so having a video presence makes common sense.
2. Construct your education based marketing messages. For example, I am engaged in article marketing or what some call content marketing. After writing an article and having it published, I will tweet the link on my Twitter account as well as post it to several other sites. Sales Training Coaching Tip: The use of platforms such as TweetDeck or HootSuite helps to consolidate your content marketing actions.
3. Schedule a calendar of when you will take action. From daily tweets to writing or updating your Facebook profile along with micro-blogging or comment blogging all take time. This is why a schedule is definitely required.
4. Consider hiring someone to help you. If you have a son or daughter who enjoys social media, you may enlist their help. Sales Training Coaching Tip: Virtual Assistants (VA) can also be a valuable support in social media efforts.
5. Monitor your results. For example, I started my blog on February 2, 2010 with an Alexa.com ranking of 410,00. The ranking continues to decrease and is a good trending tool to see overall Internet marketing penetration and therefore results. By monitoring this real time traffic monitor, I can quickly see more traffic coming to my website. Sales Training Coaching Tip: Download the free Toolbar from Alexa and you can quickly learn the traffic of other sites including your competitors. This is not the only trending tool to monitor and measure your results.

Today in business especially in marketing you must be ahead of the curve as I write in my book, "Be the Red Jacket in a Sea of Gray Suits." To handle this social media marketing challenge does require devoting time to understanding marketing, observing market trends and further expanding your own knowledge. By taking these actions, you can be the Red Jacket, secure your own competitive advantage and even increase sales.

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