© Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock.com4 Secrets for Social Media Marketing Success
What you already know about online marketing will stand you in good stead. Start with these marketing basics and work from there to create a social media plan:
- Create a hub website or blog with a domain name that you own. Social media lets you cast a wider net for your products or services. Ultimately, you still need to drive traffic to a core website or blog for additional information or purchasing.
- Develop a standard set of eight keywords or phrases and a page description for search engine optimization. Just like you optimize your website, optimize your social marketing content and profiles. Use the same description and terms over and over to improve your ranking on search engines and to appear higher on internal search results for each social media outlet.
- Plan your marketing and work your plan. Like with all other forms of marketing, your target audience drives your decisions. Market on the media outlets they use. Before you do anything, define your market, establish your goals, and decide how you will measure success.
- Keep it simple! Unless you have many people on your marketing team, you need to keep your social media efforts under control — or they will control you. Generally, you get better results by posting more often on a few sites than posting occasionally on many sites. Create a simple monthly schedule of activities that includes posting somewhere at least weekly.
Online Resources for Social Media Marketing
The first phase in writing your social media marketing plan is research. Use the websites in this table to put together the best possible social media marketing plan for your company.
| Website | Description |
| Alltop | Directory of blogs, broken down by niche |
| Business News Daily | Small business solutions and inspiration |
| Feedly | Aggregates news for any topic of choice |
| Google Trends | The current buzz and trends on any topic |
| Hootsuite Social ROI calculator | Online ROI calculator for social networking campaigns |
| HubSpot Blogs | Inbound internet marketing blog |
| LinkedIn Social Media Marketing Group | Professional discussion group; approval required to join |
| MarketingProfs Marketing Resources | Social media marketing tips, including B2B |
| MarketingSherpa | Social networking research with B2B focus |
| Mashable | Premier site for online news with social media focus |
| Quantcast | Demographic research on most sites |
| SmallBiz-Resources | Social media, online, and offline marketing tips |
| Social Mention | Tracks posts about topics on 100+ social media services |
| Technorati | Real-time blog search engine and curation |
| TopRank Online Marketing Blog | Blog about online and social marketing |
Keeping Your Social Media Marketing Under Control
Using social media as a marketing tool doesn’t have to be a chore. These helpful tips and techniques to manage your social media campaigns can save you time, money, and stress:
- Repetition is wonderful when it comes to keywords, tags, and labels. Utilizing the same core search terms and page description over and over on your website and all social media outlets not only saves time, but also improves ranking on search engine results.
- Use tools such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck, or Sprout Social to post similar content multiple places at the same time. For instance, you can upload photos to multiple social media sharing outlets at the same time or simultaneously post to your blog and Facebook.
- Schedule tweets in advance so you don’t need to remember to log on with timely messages. Tweeting once or more a day can be a nuisance, but you can use tools such as Hootsuite, SocialOomph, or Hubspot for scheduling.
- Keep track of daily social media activities. Schedule tasks for a month at a time or more with a simple calendar on Google or Yahoo!.
- Correlate data from multiple sources. Configure one standard analytical package, such as Google Analytics or Woopra, to measure all your social media results.
- Get organized! Create a master dashboard that includes links and tiered log-ins to all your social media outlets, tools, calendars, and analytic sites in one place. Configure Netvibes or Hootsuite to meet your needs.