What has always been the most effective way to generate home based business? Referrals from existing customers with their friends and families.
Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive and most productive form of advertising. Most people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only one 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a confident return on investment. No-one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers can make a purchasing decision using the input of family and friends.
Social media marketing supplies the electronic platform for word of mouth marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The common Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets go out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more frequent today through social media marketing than any other time in the annals of business. Can your company afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?
If you are like me, you study from making mistakes. However, if you can learn from the mistakes of others, then you will achieve success quicker. Why not study from the mistakes of others? Below are a few common mistakes new marketers make when trying to create and implement a social media marketing plan:
I’ll figure it out as I go- the biggest time waster is going right into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take the time to get educated on social networking sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you learn a site, learn all the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very time consuming and will result in many business owners abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the fundamentals of establishing these site, understand the different options, and spend your time engaging instead of fixing problems. There are good online educational programs on the market that can teach business owners on how best to create and implement a social media marketing plan.
Let’s add 100 sites in a single day- it’s tempting to go out and create a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at once. But the problem with this strategy is that if you grow too fast, you will not be able to match all the benefits of each site. The best approach would be to create one site, like Facebook, learn the facts and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and build relationships others. If you set up 12 at once, you will not be as active and your insufficient participation could defeat your overall goal. It’s better to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social media sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.
Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with people who don’t have complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, many people will see you before they find your website. If they find your site and you also have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will most likely ignore you. Your profile is your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most of all, be personable.
Here’s the pitch- here’s the largest stumbling block for most beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This type of media is really a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional one way marketing practices are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a fresh medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Instead of selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself as an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For example, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to market a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you’ll become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell their house, they will most likely ask for your services.
Same method of communication- not everyone receives information through exactly the same medium. Some people like to read, others like video, plus some people will be attracted to pictures on your site. The main element is to mix up the way you post. If you to put it simply out a blog each day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. When you have a blog 1 day, then put up a simple video the next. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you will achieve.
Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media marketing activity. This doesn’t mean that you have to make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal would be to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, you’ll find it’s easier to have 1 post per day than 3 days with 10 posts.
Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to truly have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I’d use to talk to people. Having to log into multiple accounts every day to check the emails became annoying, frustrating, and ineffective. The fact is, it became to time consuming to do this and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load all of my email accounts into Outlook, I was able to efficiently check and make use of the benefits of email. The same applies to social media. When you have to log into and log from 5 different social media marketing sites each day, it will become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing Luxury Travel Tip that will allow you to log into your entire social media makes up about interactions may be the best way to ensure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are several good all-in-one social media dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social media efforts.
In summary, if you’re a small business owner looking to create a social media plan for your business, then you absolutely should educate yourself on how to use the technology and find tools to assist you in the daily utilization. Unless you know how to create a house and you don’t possess a hammer, that house isn’t likely to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in this posting, you will be able to quickly and effectively create & implement your own profitable social media plan.