Monday, April 13, 2009

6 Tips To Be Successful In Social Media Marketing

Social media is being vastly used to promote products and services. Moreover, many corporates are using such community sites to keep better customer relationship and cross-sell the products or services to the existing customers in addition to find new ones.

Here are 6 simple tips one really needs to understand to be successful in social media.
  1. Change the attitude: One has to approach social media with a different attitude. An attitude which is different from the attitude you have towards other online marketing activities. In social media you have come to share knowledge, issues and solve other members’ problems. You are not here to thrust your products or services. Follow the AIDA principle – Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.
  2. Target the right audience: Use the available limited resources and budgets to target the right and niche audience instead of blindly going into social media. Take out some time and think yourself as customer and identify the areas or groups the prospect engages in and talks about the products or services which you sell. Thus, you will know where your target audience is active in the social media sphere and you can start from there. You save lot of time and effort in doing this moreover, you can easily connect with them.
  3. Set-up your own success metrics: Set-up your own success metrics for social media marketing as well as you have for organic search, PPC campaigns or email campaigns. Without these metrics you will not be sure if you are heading in the right direction or not. Define the metrics like – no. of comments for my post, no. of views for my videos, no. of stars your post or video has got as a rating from readers, how many have DIGGed your articles and so on. Depending on the numbers you get for these success elements, you can check on your progress in social media marketing.
  4. Let people know who you are: Social media is all about building relationships and sharing knowledge. So, let people know who you are. Relationships are only built on trust. Provide your name and contact information and the relationship you have with your company. Your prospects will feel comfortable with communicating with you and, if there is an unsatisfied customer, then that person can vent anger much more easily on you. This gives you a signal to solve the issue immediately before it spreads.
  5. What needs to be taken care for: Marketers should note that there is a very thin line between you and your prospects in the social media. One cannot just spam any community. Marketers need to build relationships and share knowledge. You need to take care that you are not ignored and your prospects need not consider you as spam. Be patient and slow and get them involved in conversations and build relationship with them.
  6. Quality of content: Last but not the least, success in social media is based on the quality and the creativity of your content you post on these networking sites. Content is King here as well.

Social media is an effective, economical and successful marketing tool. But, time consuming one. And requires more focused effort. Patience and commitment is very important too, to be successful I this media.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Ashish,

Its relly true. Recently when I started learning SEO from some training provider I got to work for his client project where in I was just blindly told to bookmark and submit the url rather than going and doing some kind of real time execution in Social meidia. You throw light on this.Thank you!!

Regards
Veerapandian
http://www.veerapandian.com

Rahul Sutar said...

Could you also comment about social media optimization in bit detail

Sneha said...

i read first in your blog about social media marketing.
thanx a lot for share

Unknown said...

very nice article it really helps a lot can u post a article regarding recipocal link excahnge

href="http://www.intractions.com/index.html"

Aashish Malve said...

Thanks all.

@intra - You will find lot of them across the internet. One related post regarding link building posted by me on this blog is here.

Aashish Malve said...

@Rahul You will find more info on Social Media Marketing in these posts. Let me know if you need more info.

The Four Important Steps to Start Social Networking for Business
5 Important Approaches for Social Networking for Companies