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WHERE BUSINESSES GO TO GROW

Is Social Media Marketing a Magical Solution?

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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.

But, as with anything that sounds like an instant easy road to success, the truth is actually slightly different.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have success with a social media marketing campaign – it just means that you’ll have to work for it. In fact, social media marketing is actually more labor-intensive than traditional marketing models. You have to spend time keeping up with your accounts, interacting with customers, and simply being… well, social.

The trade-off for all this effort investment is, of course, is the cost. Whereas advertising the old-fashioned way could set you back a pretty penny, almost all social networking is completely free. This means you could take whatever money you were investing in traditional ads and instead hire a social media manager to help you keep up with your accounts.

You’d still need (and want) to be personally involved, though – if you’re not really in touch with what’s going on in the day-to-day operations of your social media marketing campaigns, it will soon show. Today’s social media user can sense when things are running on auto-pilot, and will quickly go elsewhere if that’s the case.

It’s also important to have a strategy. While sites like Twitter and Facebook are pretty easy to manage on a personal level without too much thought, for your company pages you’ll want to be a bit more deliberate. For example, it makes no sense to have separate accounts everywhere and then simply push the same information out to all of them. Content for your Twitter account needs to be tailored for Twitter, Facebook content tailored for Facebook, and so forth.

You have many choices for social media accounts, and in addition to Facebook and Twitter, it’s essential to understand where your efforts would best be spent. Would it make sense for your business to have a YouTube account? A Foursquare account? Or would you be better off on Linked in? Making choices that are appropriate for your situation is yet another factor in whether social media marketing will be the solution you were looking for.

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