11 ways to do social media marketing

here are plenty of things you can do to simplify your social media marketing strategy. Here are eleven of my favorites to get you started:

1. Only Go Where Your Customers Are

There are so many social media channels nowadays that it can be overwhelming just trying to figure out which sites you need to participate on. The simplest solution: focus on the sites where your prospective customers are already congregating.
For most businesses, that’s going to include the two big social media sites of the moment: Facebook and Twitter. Beyond that, though, it will depend largely on the niche you’re targeting. Listen to your customers, and see which ones they talk about most, and then deliberately ignore all the rest.
Not only will it take less time, but you’ll be able to do it better. By limiting the number of sites you’re focusing on, you’ll be able to give each one the attention it deserves, and over the long run, that will pay off with much deeper engagement with your customers.

2. Take Advantage of Available Tools

There are hundreds of tools out there that can help you better manage your social media presence. Most of these let you update all of your accounts from one, meaning you only have to visit one site, rather than half a dozen.
A few tools you might want to check out include:
Flock, a web browser with built-in social media and blogging tools.
TweetDeck, a Twitter client that also has support for MySpace and Facebook updates.
HootSuite, an online Twitter client with support for Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, MySpace, and others, as well as support for multiple authors and scheduling of updates.
Ping.fm, an online tool with support for virtually every major social media site and blogging platform.

3. Share the Responsibility

If you look at the successful social media efforts of many companies, both large and small, you’ll see that they don’t just have one person in charge of their social media activities. They have multiple people all chipping in.
Companies like Wired magazine and Etsy use one employee at a time to update their Twitter feeds, rotating that employee on a regular basis. Some companies do it daily, while others rotate on a weekly basis. Either way, everyone gets to disconnect and take a break.
Other companies, such as MediaTemple and Comcast, have several people working at once. Employees may either update one account (often signing their respective updates with initials) or each have accounts that are then associated with their employer (such as ComcastBonnie and ComcastSteve on Twitter, both representatives of Comcast).

4. Enlist Help from the Community

Providing useful, relevant information to your social media friends and followers gets difficult after a while. When you’re immersed in a subject day after day, it all starts to sound the same, and you end up spending more and more time finding content to post.
The simplest fix: ask your community for help.
Let everyone know you’re looking for fresh, interesting content, and then let them send you ideas. You can also follow others who post relevant links and then repost it. No, you won’t be releasing totally original content, but most people won’t care. Chances are, they’re not following the same people you are, so they’ll hear it from you first anyway.

5. Schedule Your Updates

The best social media management tools allow you to schedule updates. This lets you batch your messages so they post regularly throughout the day. Rather than taking five minutes every hour to post an update, you can just take half an hour in the morning or evening to schedule all of your posts for the day.

6. Don’t Follow Everyone Who Follows You

It’s common to feel like you should follow everyone who follows you.
On sites like Facebook, following is a two-way street. You accept a friend request and they automatically see your updates as you see theirs. But on sites like Twitter, users can follow you without any technical requirement to follow them back.
A lot of people think it’s good manners to follow anyone who follows you, and when you only have a few hundred followers, that can make sense. But as your follower numbers grow from a few hundred to a few thousand or more, trying to keep up with all of those people is impossible, so don’t even try. Nothing says you’re obligated to follow them back, and most people won’t be offended if you don’t.

7. Organize Your Friends and Followers

If you just can’t bring yourself not to follow everyone who follows you, then take advantage of the organizational tools out there to filter your feeds.
Use lists on Twitter to categorize those you follow so you can make sure you’re getting the updates from those you care about most. Use friend lists on Facebook, and don’t be afraid to hide updates from certain people who tend to clog up your news feed.
With other sites, use the filtering tools built into some of the social media management apps mentioned above to organize everyone. You can create lists of most and least important people, allowing you to prioritize who you want to watch the most.

8. Stick to a Time Limit

Social media can be addictive.
It’s easy to get lost spending hours on sites like Twitter and Facebook. You find yourself popping over to check your new notifications every ten minutes, interrupting your other work.
The best solution: use a timer. Set it for 15 or 30 minutes, and when the time is up, make yourself logout. Or, if you’re managing multiple accounts, set the timer for 5 or 10 minutes, and then move on to the next account when it dings.

9. Use Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service from Google that keeps track of everything published to the web and sends you an email about anything containing keywords you specify.
Rather than spending hours looking for new content to post, set up Google alerts for common keywords and topics associated with your niche. You should also set up alerts for your company name and product names so you know what’s being said about you and your products and can respond appropriately.
You can opt to have the information emailed to you as soon as it’s found, or on a daily or weekly basis. For alerts related to your company or products, immediate alerts are probably the best idea so you know as soon as something is said and can address it quickly. For everything else, a daily digest-style alert is more efficient.

10. Scan Instead of Read

Hang around social media long enough, and you become a master at scanning for relevant information. Reading every update that comes your way would take hours, but you can scan all of them in a few minutes, picking out what’s important and what’s not, and then spending your time where it counts.
The simplest strategy is to look for relevant keywords from your company and industry, and then focus on those. Or, if you’re looking for content to send to your friends and followers, most people will put the headline in their update before the link, allowing you to decide whether or not to click it.
In the beginning, it’ll be tough to figure out what’s relevant and what’s not, but give it time. The longer you are active in social media, the better you get at instinctively spotting things that are important. Like everything else, it just takes practice.

11. Measure Your Impact and Adjust Accordingly

Too often we make a plan for how we’re going to use social media in our business and then blindly stick to that plan for months or years, with little review or adjustment. But that leads to a lot of waste. Like with any other marketing channel, you should periodically review your social media marketing strategy and make any necessary adjustments.
For instance, you may find that you’re just not getting the results you expected from Twitter, Facebook, or one of the other social media sites you were targeting. If that’s the case, do your best to figure out if there’s something you’re doing wrong, and if there’s not, then ask yourself if it’s really worth your time to continue.
This simplifies things by streamlining where we’re placing our efforts. If a certain channel just isn’t working for your business, then stop using it. Refocus your energy into the channels that are working for you.
Social media marketing is powerful, yes, but at the end of the day it’s still just another marketing strategy. You expect it to produce results, and if it’s not, then something has to change.
That’s just smart business.

Marketing Thoughts

Pick up a newspaper, magazine or advertising circular and look at the ads. What do you see? A whole bunch of the same thing: a list of services; a company name; a tagline; a pretty graphic; and maybe an offer.

Most businesses think of advertising in one of two ways:

1) Put your company name in front of enough people enough times so they’ll remember you when it’s time to buy. … or

2) Put an “amazing” offer out there and people will be compelled to respond (whether they’ve made the decision to buy or not).

The first scenario is called ”top of mind” advertising and unless you have a multi-million dollar marketing budget it’s very difficult to buy top of mind brand awareness. In the second example advertising sales people want their advertisers to see results (because results sell more advertising), so they recommend you put an offer in your ad: Get 10% off service, $5.00 of a product, buy one get one free, etc. And sure, that works - sometimes.

Let’s Analyze the “Compelling Offer” Approach:

Does putting an amazing offer in front of people influence them to buy even if they don’t have an immediate or compelling want or need? Does an amazing offer force someone to buy if they don’t have a budget? No, it doesn’t. So your ad gets completely ignored and you don’t get any response. (Ok to be fair – best case scenario – someone may clip it, stick it to the fridge where it will hang for a month or two before it ends up in a drawer or in the trash).

How an Ad Gets Seen….or Not.

Consider this scenario: I’m looking at an ad in the free local magazine that comes in the mail every month; it’s an ad for a $75 carpet, tile or grout cleaning. Well, my tile and grout happen to be pretty clean- well clean enough for me right now. So I’m not interested in spending $75 to get it cleaned, even if it is a great deal. I ignore the ad and move on.

Now let’s think about this… I am a tile owner. At some point in my life I may need tile cleaning services. However, did I notice the name of the business offering the deal? NO. Do I know how they are different from every other steam cleaning company out there? NO. Has this ad given me a reason to remember them when I am ready to get my tile and grout clean? NO. Has this ad engaged me in any way? NO.

Old School Advertising Doesn’t Work!

And what’s the traditional reaction when advertising doesn’t work? Ask any advertising rep and they’ll tell you - you need to advertise MORE (i.e.: spend MORE money), so that when your prospect is ready to buy they will see or remember your ad and call you. But how much are you willing to spend to make a sale?

So let’s say you spend $175 / month on the ad and it takes me 6 months to decide I need to clean my tile. Let’s say I happen to choose you because I remembered seeing your ad in the magazine for the past six months and because your offer is better than the other guy who is doing it for $100. You’ve just paid $1050 to get my $75 sale. Sure, you may up-sell me, I may become a regular customer and my life time value may be in the thousands – but those are big “ifs”. Think about that: you are spending hundreds – or even thousands – of dollars hoping to reach a prospect at exactly the right time in their buying process. Doesn’t that seem like a pretty large gamble to you? No wonder businesses think advertising doesn’t work!

A New Way to Advertise.

What if, instead of advertising with the hope of making your phone ring off the hook and breaking sales records immediately, you take a different approach! What if you try something Duct Tape Marketing calls the “2 Step Approach to Advertising”? What if, instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on print ads trying to find that needle in a haystack – that rare person who is ready to buy what you are offering the second they see your ad – you find potential prospects and get their permission to market to them on a more consistent basis and with more targeted offers while spending less money?

Here’s How 2 Step Advertising Works:

Create an ad offering a free report: “5 Easy Things You Can do to Keep Your Tile and Grout Clean”. Or better yet, “How to Remove Tile and Grout Stains Yourself”. OK, I know what you’re thinking… you’re thinking this is crazy and it’s going to cost you business –right? Well, you’re wrong. It won’t cost you business; in fact this approach will accomplish three things. It will:

1. Get people to your website where they can learn more about you.
2. Attract people who actually own tile and who will give you permission to market to them on a regular basis.
3. Prove that you care more about helping people than making a sale (prospects love that).

The goal of marketing is to get people who have a need to KNOW, LIKE AND TRUST you so when they are ready to buy, they buy from you. Offering helpful and useful information helps build your KNOW, LIKE and TRUST factors and yes, increases sales.

The goal of 2 Step Advertising is to get prospects to your site and get their permission to engage them by collecting their email addresses. Once you have their permission you can email surveys, newsletters, tips and offers geared specifically to their needs on a monthly or bi-monthly basis for about a penny an email.

Think about how powerful that is: You get to communicate with a prospect who has given you permission to market to them for one tiny penny! That’s HUGE!

Your New Advertising Strategy

How many more responses do you think you can get when you stop selling in your advertiing and start offering helpful information? People hate to be sold. And that’s what traditional advertising is all about. What if you can get 10 new people on your email list from each ad? What if 1 of those people eventually buys from you at full price – or close to it? What is the cost of that one customer compared to the one you got by practicing traditional advertising? I guarantee that if you implement this approach as part of your marketing strategy you will get results and begin to see your business grow.