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An intro to Social Media Optimization for your Business

Guest post by: Kevin Bourne

Article Overview: Do you want to enter the realm of social media for your business, but you don't know where and how to go about it properly? Using social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and many other can be a powerful way for your business to be a part of the online community to create awareness and engage an online audience.

An intro to Social Media Optimization for your Business

Many small businesses and even large ones are hopping on the social media bandwagon with hopes of using it as a new marketing strategy, but fail to realize and develop a long term social media optimization strategy for their business.

Businesses enter with hopes of connecting with a large audience, attracting more leads and the end result, more sales.Unfortunately many businesses end up wasting valuable time and money and give-up entirely on social media.

With most businesses still on the sidelines, one needs to understand that not so long ago many businesses never had a website. Now just opening a business without one is sure commercial, suicide doesn’t matter if your business is the local store or selling grandma’s knitting.

With social media becoming another communication platform such as the telephone and email, etc. you can be assured that it will be absolutely necessary to have a presence on at least a few social networks. If you’re still in denial, the longer you wait your, competitors are making themselves known and connecting with your future and probably current customers on social media so just make sure to keep that in mind.

So what should you do?

A solution to this problem is tolearn from other businesses that have developed a successful social media marketing strategy. You should be able to see that social media marketing strategy in action. How you do see that plan in action? That’s easy. Visit a competitors or other successful business’ Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or whatever networks they might be on.

Here are a few things you look for

• How are they using social networks?
• Where can they be found?
• How do they engage and keep their audience interested?
• How do they connect with their audience and join the conversation?
• Are they speaking with their audience on a daily basis?
• What incentives are they giving their audience if any?
• What kind of information are they broadcasting to their audience?

These are just a few points that you should be paying attention to. Not only will it give you an insight into how to run your social networks, it can give you a competitive edge on weaknesses and social media strategy development.

Once you develop a plan of action and decide which social networks you want to make your presence known, your social media strategy should include researching your target market and planning on how you want to reach them. One social media strategy that should be in the mix is blogs, so plan on being there and attach that blog to your website. Marketing Sherpa has stated in the Social Media Marketing Report 2010 that social media marketing strategies related toblogging and microblogging tactics are the most effective means for achieving social media objectives and engaging your target market.

Here are a few tips you can use to research your target market.

• Find the keywords that target your audience and use them to provide solutions to their problems.
• Find out where your niche online target market hangs out and find out what they are thinking and talking about. If they hangout in forums of blogs then you should be their participating in the conversation.
• Quantcast or any other website that can give you information on popular websites in your niche market.
• Google Buzz and Trendsto see what’s trending, hot and the buzz. See what people are talking about.
• Google Insights to see what and where people are searching for in your niche.
• Simple Google search using keywords relevant to your niche, to find your competitors. Most likely the top ranking ones are engaging in some form of online marketing and dissecting what their doing online will open your thinking process in developing solutions to your success.

The next step for your entrance into social media strategy and optimization as development should then be to outline your social media objectives and goals. Remember success insocial media strategy should not be measured by how many Facebook fans or Twitter followers you have. It’s all about quality not quantity. Having 5000 Facebook fans that are not interested in your product or service is not going to do you any good over 1000 fans that are interested in you.

Stay tuned for more on how to set social media objectives, goals and a few easy tactics for your entry into the marketing opportunities of social media for your business.

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Article Tags: business marketing, facebook, facebook marketing, marketing, social media, social media marketing, social media optimization, twitter
Referred by: http://www.streetsmartmarketer.com/



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Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff
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Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":gvtxsu7g]Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff[/quote:gvtxsu7g] Hi Jeff, Thanks for the suggestion. Why don't you start a new post (with a poll) to see if there's enough interest in your idea for a social media section?
Re: UPDATES: New Campaign! New Layout! New Ideas! - GT - thanks for the FYI - I'm not sure if we'll put a link back. Something to consider though! Trent - the new category is "Social Network and Media" which was put in to compliment the Online Businesses category that currently exists. Overall the new categories are: - Looking For, Networking and Events - Review My... - Social Network and Media - Brags and Rants These came as a result of Ringo doing research on other forums and thinking about what could be improved on ours to give a better experience for everyone. I hope you enjoy them! David, I'm looking forward to reading your Brag / Rant!


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