As with most success stories, tales of a meteoric social media campaign gone viral can make you believe that the same kind of success is right around the corner for you, too. You might imagine sitting back while the visitors roll in on your Twitter and Facebook pages, and while you wonder why you didn't get into social media marketing earlier.
Most businesses and individuals are on all the major social networks. This means that marketing for Facebook, Twitter, and the like becomes somewhat easier over time, as there is a lot of group knowledge about the best ways to reach out to an audience via these regularly-used channels. But what if there's a social network out there that is a little more tailored to the focus of your business?
Trying to keep up with the latest social networks and social media marketing opportunities is a never-ending battle. As soon as you get to grips with your Twitter and Facebook strategy, up pops Google+. Some businesses also found significant marketing milage on Tumblr. More recently, photo-curation site Pinterest has gotten the attention of businesses who have discovered how to leverage its features for marketing purposes.
It's happened to most of us at one time or another - you get something on your Facebook page all set up just how you want it, and then boom, Facebook goes and changes everything and your hard work goes down the drain. While most of Facebook's changes actually benefit page owners in the long run, it can be hard to remember that when you've just spent hours on a feature that suddenly gets disabled or removed. It can also leave you wondering if you'll ever be able to stay ahead of the curve when things on Facebook seem to change almost monthly.
If you were a business owner before Twitter was around, chances are most of your marketing messages (aside from maybe your company slogan) were at least somewhat longer than 140 characters. With the explosion of Twitter both as a marketing tool and a social media platform, you may feel like the medium places difficult restrictions on the types of messages you can reasonably fit into the space provided. However, this may work to your advantage - here are some tips on how to use Twitter more effectively for spreading the word about your business.
One of the great things about YouTube is that the site can be used for so many purposes - entertainment, education, promotion, or a combination of the three. The sheer amount of visibility that your company can get by just having a few well-constructed promotional videos is staggering, and it's something you shouldn't ignore if you want to get the absolute most out of your marketing strategy.
If you were ever in any doubt about the effectiveness of social media and online marketing, looking at the successes of other businesses can really help turn you into a believer. Seeing what these companies have done with their campaigns may inspire you to do some forward thinking of your own!
As we head into February, hopefully you're starting to see how the changes you've made to your marketing strategy for this year are manifesting. However, trends are hardly static, and as soon as you start implementing one set of tactics, new developments emerge that can help you decide how to fine-tune your efforts.
Social media marketing is obviously a huge deal in the context of building a name for yourself online, and converting that name into followers, and then into leads. But in a sea of countless social networks, among which Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are the current frontrunners, how can you know exactly where your efforts would be best spent?
There's a lot of talk about growing a strong social media presence for your business, but in the end there's no point if you can't convert your reading audience into a buying one. To make 2012 your biggest year ever, here are seven tips for turning followers into customers.
2012 is finally here, which means you have a clean slate to build an improved social media strategy that will better benefit your business in the coming months. Here are some things to keep in mind when constructing your strategy for this year:
2010 was a big year in terms of businesses starting to establish a social media presence, and 2011 expanded on that with an explosion in the number of businesses that started taking social media seriously as a marketing tool. Now that we've done an adequate amount of setting things up, it's time to start thinking of 2012 as the year when we really push forward and begin to innovate in terms of using social media in the best possible way, and customizing the experience so that each business is serving its own customers in a manner that suits their particular situation.