Powerful social media marketing for business

                                        

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Guide to Using Social Media for Marketing

Using social media for marketing can enable small business looking to further their reach to more customers. Your customers are interacting with brands through social media, therefore, having a strong social media presence on the web is the key to tap into their interest. If implemented correctly, marketing with social media can bring remarkable success to your business.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that implements various social media networks in order to achieve marketing communication and branding goals. Social media marketing primarily covers activities involving social sharing of content, videos, and images for marketing purposes.

At WordStream, we’ve created this guide to provide you with the social media marketing training you need to better your business. We want to give small businesses on short budgets an alternative to hiring a social media marketing agency or paying for social media marketing services.

With our Social Media Marketing 101 Guide below, you can begin developing your own social media marketing expert plan.

Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses: Learn Social Media Marketing 101

This education guide gives a basic overview on how to use social media for marketing, serving as a social media marketing for dummies manual. Read to learn about how to reap the benefits of using social media in marketing.

Social Media and Marketing: Start With a Plan

Before you begin creating social media marketing campaigns, consider your business’ goals. Starting a social media marketing campaign without a plan in mind is like wandering through a forest without a map—you’ll only end up lost.

Create a social media marketing plan and brainstorm about your goals: what are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing? Who is your target audience? Where would your target audience hang out and how would they use social media? What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?

Social Media for Marketing: Developing Your Goals

Social media marketing can help with a number of goals, such as:

• Website traffic
• Conversions
• Brand awareness
• Creating a brand identity and positive brand association
• Communication and interaction with key audiences

Only by establishing your goals can you measure your social media ROI.

Best Social Media Marketing Tips: Learn Marketing with Social Media

Here are some social media marketing tips to keep you on the right track across all your social media campaigns.

• Planning – As discussed previously, building a social media marketing plan is essential. Consider keyword research and brainstorm content ideas that will interest your target audience.
• Content is King — Consistent with other areas of online marketing, content reigns king when it comes to social media marketing. Make sure you are offering valuable information that your ideal customers will find interesting. Create a variety of content by implementing social media images, videos, and infographics in addition to classic text-based content.
• Consistent Brand Image — Using social media for marketing enables your business to project your brand image across a variety of different social media platforms. While each platform has its own unique environment and voice, your business’ core identity should stay consistent.
• Blog — Blogging is a great social media marketing tool that lets you share a wide array of information and content with readers. Your company blog can also serve as your social media marketing blog, in which you blog about your recent social media efforts, contests, and events.    
• Links — While using social media for marketing relies primarily on your business sharing its own unique, original content to gain followers, fans, and devotees, it’s also great to link to outside articles as well. If other sources provide great, valuable information you think your target audience will enjoy, don’t be shy about linking to them. Linking to outside sources improves trust and reliability, and you may even get some links in return.
• Track Competitors — It’s always important to keep an eye on competitors—they can provide valuable data for keyword research, where to get industry-related links, and other social media marketing insight. If your competitors are using a certain social media marketing technique that seems to be working for them, do the same thing, but do it better!
• Measure Success with Analytics —You can’t determine the success of your social media marketing strategies without tracking data. Google Analytics can be used as a great social media marketing tool that will help you measure your triumphant social media marketing techniques, as well as determine which strategies are better off abandoned.  Attach tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can properly monitor them.

How to Use Social Media for Marketing: Know Your Platform

We’ve put together a brief overview on how to use social media for marketing according to each platform’s unique environment. Various social media marketing sites will require different techniques, so develop a unique strategy tailored for each platform.

Facebook

Facebook’s casual, friendly environment requires an active social media marketing strategy that begins with creating a Facebook Business Fan Page.  You will want to pay careful attention to layout, as the visual component is a key aspect of the Facebook experience. Social media marketing for business pages revolves around furthering your conversation with audiences by posting industry-related articles, images, videos, etc.

Facebook is a place people go to relax and chat with friends, so keep your tone light and friendly.

Google+

Google+ is the new Facebook competitor, and it promotes the same fun, casual atmosphere. On Google+ you can upload and share photos, videos, links, and view all your +1s. Also take advantage of Google+ circles, which allow you to segment your followers into smaller groups, enabling you to share information with some followers while barring others. For example, you might try creating a “super-fan” circle, and share special discounts and exclusive offers only with that group.

You can also try hosting video conferences with Hangouts and experiment using the Hangout feature in some fun, creative ways. Some social media marketing ideas: if you're a salon, host a how-to session on how to braid your hair. If you own a local bookstore, try offering author video chats. If you're feeling adventerous, invite your +1s to your Google+ Community. Google+ Communities will allow you to listen into your fan's feedback and input, truly putting the social back into social media.

Pinterest

Pinterest is the latest in social media marketing trends. Pinterest’s image-centered platform is ideal for retail, but anyone can benefit from using Pinterest for social media purposes.

Pinterest allows small businesses to showcase their own product offerings while also developing their own brand’s personality with some unique pinboards.

Twitter

Twitter is the social media marketing tool that lets you broadcast your updates across the web. Follow tweeters in your industry or related fields, and you should gain a steady stream of followers in return.

Mix up your official-related tweets about specials, discounts, and news updates with some fun and quirky tweets interspersed. Be sure to retweet when a customer has something nice to say about you, and don’t forget answer people’s questions when possible.  Using Twitter as a social media marketing tool revolves around dialog and communication, so be sure to interact as much as possible

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the more professional social media marketing sites. LinkedIn Groups is a great venue for entering into a professional dialog with people in similar industries and provides a place to share content with like-minded individuals. 

Encourage customers or clients to give your business a recommendation on your LinkedIn profile. Recommendations makes your business appear more credible and reliable for new customers. Also browse the Questions section of LinkedIn; providing answers helps you get established and earns trust.

YouTube

YouTube is the number one place for creating video content, with can be an incredibly powerful social media marketing tool. Many businesses try to create video content with the aim of having their video “go viral,” but in reality those chances are pretty slim. Instead, focus on creating useful, instructive “how-to” videos. These how-to videos also have the added benefit of ranking on the video search results of Google, so don't under-estimate the power of video content!

Location-Based Social Media Tools

Social media platforms like Yelp, FourSquare, and Level Up are great for brick and mortar businesses looking to implement marketing social media. Register on these sites to claim your location spot, and then consider extra incentives such as check-in rewards or special discounts. Remember, these visitors will have their phones in hand so they will have access to providing reviews which could hurt or significantly aid your users.

Reddit

Reddit, or similar social media platforms such as Stumble Upon or Digg, are ideal for sharing compelling content. With over 2 billion page views a month, Reddit has incredible social media marketing potential, but marketers should be warned that only truly unique, interesting content will be welcomed. Posting on Reddit is playing with fire—submit spammy or overtly sales-focused content and your business could get berated by this extremely tech-savvy community.

If you have content you believe the Reddit community (majority is young, geeky, liberal, and internet-obsessed) would enjoy, you could reap tremendous benefits and earn valuable traffic.

Using social media in marketing does more than improve site traffic and help businesses reach more customers; it provides a valuable venue for better understanding and learning from your target audiences. Hopefully this guide has helped you better understand how using social media for marketing  can improve your business.

Looking for better results? Pay-per-click marketing is a growing form of online advertising that continues to be very successfully for small and medium sized businesses. Learn about PPC and try WordStream's PPC Optimization software for free today!

More Social Media Marketing Articles

Looking to learn more detailed information about implementing social media in marketing? Get more information about social media and how to use it for your business.

Experts Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media - Learn about how to conduct winning keyword research for various social media marketing campaigns.

Social Media Showdown Infographic - Compare social media platforms to see which have the potential to drive the most traffic for your b2c or b2b social media marketing campaigns.

Learn From Social Media Marketing Experts - We conducted a series of interviews with various industry experts who share their knowledge about using social media in marketing campaigns. Read our interview with:

• Social Media Marketing Expert Alexander Howard
• Social Media Marketing Expert Chris Brogan
• Social Media Marketing Expert Tamar Weinberg
• Social Media Marketing Expert Rebecca Kelly

Benefits of Live-Tweet Sessions - Discover the advantages of conducting live Twitter chats with customers and target audiences.

10 Tips for Creating Compelling Facebook Content - Discover the secret to creating content that users can’t help but “Like”. It’s easy to use social media for marketing when your content makes visitors want to share and learn more.

Guide to Ranking on Google with YouTube Video Content -This two-part YouTube video content guide explains how YouTube videos can help your business rank higher in Google SERPs and why video content is so valuable.

10 SEO Reasons to Add Facebook to Your Content Strategy - Read how Facebook can provide tremendous SEO benefits for small businesses.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Kick off each Monday with the best news and ideas in social media.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites.

Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of other activities.

How Are Search & Social Media Marketing Related?

Why would a search marketer — or a site about search engines — care about social media? The two are very closely related.

Social media often feeds into the discovery of new content such as news stories, and “discovery” is a search activity. Social media can also help build links that in turn support into SEO efforts. Many people also perform searches at social media sites to find social media content. Social connections may also impact the relevancy of some search results, either within a social media network or at a ‘mainstream’ search engine.

Social Media Marketing At Marketing Land

Marketing Land is the sister site to Search Engine Land that covers all facets of internet marketing, including these popular topics within social media marketing:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Google+ 
• Linkedin
• YouTube
• Social Media Marketing How To Guides & more!

At Search Engine Land, we occasionally cover social media news with a search angle, you’ll find all of our most recent articles related to ‘social search’ here:

• All Social Search Related Stories

More Social Media Marketing Resources

Search Engine Land and Marketing Land produce the SMX conference series. Many of our SMX events have topics that cover social media. There’s also our annual event entirely devoted to social media. Check out the site to learn more: SMX Social Media Marketing.

Subscribe to our weekly Social Media Marketing digest and Marketing Day daily recap newsletters, with the latest articles from Marketing Land and Search Engine Land, as well as the day’s news sources all over the web.

Twitter Marketing: When is the Best Time to Tweet?

A frequently asked question about the social media platform Twitter, is: when is the best time to tweet? By this, people are really asking:

• “When is the best time to tweet?”
• “How can I increase engagement and conversation?”
• “How can I get more people to retweet my tweets?”

Determining this is no easy feat, and in my view it really depends on who your target market is, where they are in the world, why they use Twitter (for business or for pleasure), and on and on and on. However, Buddy Media recently published a report titled “Strategies for Effective Tweeting: A Statistical Review.” The report is based on the data compiled from their analysis of user-engagement from over 320 Twitter profiles managed by various brands.  Based on their data they make several recommendations for how best to maximize the use of Twitter as a business. The folks at Fuseworks put this data together in a nice, easy to read infographic:Additional resources about when to tweet can be found at: Social Media Today: How Often Should You Tweet Today Made: How Often Should I Tweet Christopher Penn: When is the Best Time to Tweet 2012 Edition Check out Wishpond’s Twitter Campaigns to boost your ROI – whenever you Tweet – using contests and promotions.

9 Hot Tips for Small Business Marketing on Facebook

1. See if Your Vanity URL Is Available

Before you launch your brand presence on Facebook, you need to make sure that your vanity URL is available — and that it’s simple and easy to remember.

Rather than going through the time consuming process of manually figuring out what’s available and what’s not, use a simple but powerful service called Name Vine. It checks domain names, Facebook and Twitter extensions in a matter of seconds to see if your desired vanity URL is available.

2. Use a Third-Party Platform to Distribute Social Content

Copying and pasting content, logging in from one social media network and logging out from another can be a time consuming task — but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re looking to push content to Facebook and other social networks, you can benefit from using a tool like HootSuite, which allows you to publish once and distribute everywhere. You can integrate your Facebook Page, Twitter account, Google+ page, LinkedIn profile and other social networks — all within one easy-to-use interface.

3. Use an Application Publishing Platform

For small and medium-sized businesses, social media budgets are nowhere close to those of global brands, which can afford multiple custom applications and promotions on Facebook. However, large budgets aren’t required to launch a lot of the basic applications seen on Facebook.

Services such as North Social and Pagemodo provide the kinds of applications that most businesses need. Also, most of these services provide a "freemium" model that offers some applications for free. Keep in mind that you won’t get a customized app, but you can manage the content and visuals within pre-developed apps that are available. This may be a good first step into the Facebook world if your budget is a main concern.

If you do decide to launch some of these applications, you should set up the following applications/tabs:

• A Welcome Page: This should be the default landing page that welcomes a user to an application. Typically, these pages are fan-gated, meaning the person is asked to “like” the page to unveil more content.
• A Contact Us Page: This is a great and useful tool for converting your fans into potential sales leads.

You should set up at least one or two tab applications on your Facebook Page, so users aren’t landing on your Facebook wall, but rather a page that’s informative, engaging and able to convert those users into fans.

4. Utilize Social Plugins Wherever Possible

The most underutilized (free) tools are Facebook social plugins. A new study from Gigya shows that users who visit third-party sites through Facebook Connect spend 50% more time on those sites. Furthermore, those users view twice as many pages. The numbers speak for themselves.

Aside from use on third-party sites, social plugins can also be utilized on Facebook apps to provide a deeper level of engagement, while driving traffic back to the application. Above, you'll see the Facebook application Majestic Media built for Volkswagen, which invited users to participate in the next Volkswagen commercial. It was utilized to build meaningful conversations within the application, while driving new social traffic to the campaign.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is — leverage the social plugins on your blog, Facebook apps and on your website. They’re free to use and are a quick and easy way to market your brand or message through referral traffic.

5. Find Out When and What to Post on Facebook

If you’re looking to see what your fans engage with the most — and when to post it on Facebook— you can utilize a third-party service called Edgerank Checker.

This time-saving application grades your fan page and determines the following key factors:

• Most effective day of the week to post content
• Popular keywords that drive engagement
• What type of media is best for your audience
• How often to update

6. Use Facebook Insights

If you have to provide a report of Facebook metrics to your boss or a client — or maybe you just want to see for yourself — the best time-saving tip is to export the Facebook Insights data to an Excel spreadsheet. You can see which status updates performed best, whether your audience responds well to video and get a sense of what's driving your Likes.

You can do this by clicking the “Export Data” button. In the pop-up that appears, select the data type and date range.

Once you’ve done this and downloaded the file, open it in Excel and apply a filter by going to the data tab and clicking on "Filter." You have to make sure that your cursor is at the very top row. In the example, we’ve chosen the "Lifetime Post Total Reach" metric to filter by.

Once this filter is selected, you can quickly filter any key metrics in ascending or descending order, which is a very powerful trick when analyzing your Facebook marketing and engagement efforts.

7. Provide Local Content

Nobody wants to visit a Facebook Page with an enticing offer, only to learn that it's not available in their region. Nor do they want to land on a brand page where all the content is in another language.

Here are some quick strategies for providing localized content:

• Give your fans an incentive to visit your business by providing them with a recent, active “walk-in” promotion in their area.
• Allow users to recognize that you are connected with their location by providing details and assets specific to where they are.
• Geotarget your posts even if you don’t have multiple locations — you wouldn’t want to offer a walk-in special to your fans in New York if your business is in Los Angeles

When you have to target languages, Facebook allows you to make status updates for users with certain language settings. So, Facebook users who have French or Spanish as their default language on the site will only see your content that's in their native tongue.

• 1. Click on "Custom"





• 2. A pop-up will come up that will look like this:




• 3. Once you've entered your specific targeting information, you can hit "Okay" and proceed with your status update, geared for that specific audience. It’s local and relevant for those language settings selected.

8. Create a QR Code for Your Facebook Fan Page

Setting up a QR code for your Facebook Page is a quick, simple and effective strategy for small or large businesses to use. QR codes can be leveraged on napkins, menus, business cards, billboards, magazines, brochures and other forms of marketing materials.
Esponce is one of the most powerful QR code platforms on the market, and it offers a free tier that’s typically geared to small businesses.

The process takes no more than a few minutes to set up and allows you to:

• Create a custom QR code
• Embed your logo into the QR code
• Link your QR code to a dynamic URL — so you can customize and change the URL if you decide you want to later drive users to your website instead of your Facebook Page.

You’ll have the ability to view analytics so you can see how many people have scanned your code, their location and the type of smartphone that scanned the image.

9. Buy Facebook Ads

Buying Facebook ads is a wise, cost-effective solution that can help increase your brand's visibility throughout the Facebook platform. Most people don’t realize how easy they are to set up or that you can buy in with a small ad spend. A budget of $50 per month would be sufficient for a small business to make some waves.

Facebook's "Like" ads provide users the opportunity to “like” your fan page from any page they are on. If a user doesn't click on the "Like" button, don't interpret that as your campaign not working — these ads are relevant because they keep users engaged and informed with the latest in your marketing campaign. Think of them as a brand awareness play — just because they aren't clicked, doesn't mean they're not acknowledged.

More recently, one of the best ways to invest in Facebook advertising is by leveraging Sponsored Stories. According to a study by TBG Digital, Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories ad units nabbed a 46% higher click-through rate, a 20% lower cost per click and an 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ad units.

Do you have other tips for Facebook Marketing? Let us know in the comments.

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