Social Media Marketing Overview

Most business owners are aware that social media marketing can be an exceptionally good way to gain exposure.  With the large, and growing number of social media platforms, you many wonder how to use social media for marketing.  Still, some folks may have not made the connection between social media and marketing yet and wonder, "What is social media marketing?"

To engage in effective social media marketing, you will need a social media marketing plan that involves a specific social media marketing strategy.  

When making your overall plan, you will need to decide which social media platforms to target, given that there are so many available:

1. Facebook
2. LinkedIn
3. YouTube
4. Twitter
5. Google+
6. Instagram

A good rule of thumb is to focus on a couple of platforms you can really target rather than spreading your campaign out too much by trying to use them all.  Naturally, you will want to go where your customers are.  Facebook is a pretty good overall bet because most homes have at least one, and maybe more, Facebook accounts.  So is LinkedIn, which has over 364 million users.  If you have a very specific product, you may want to go to a site that caters to the interests of your customers, for example, Instagram would be a good platform for a cell phone company (How do people take most of the pictures posted to Instagram?  With their cell phones, of course).

Hosting social media events is a good way to bring attention to your product or services.  A Facebook "fan page day" is an online networking party where you may allow all your fans to share links to their pages on your page.  This can greatly increase your visibility.  The images you choose for your social media platform are also very important.  If you are continually posting without getting likes, shares and comments, you are not being effective.  Images that invite viewers to answer a question or otherwise actively participate in your platform have been found to be particularly effective.  Finally, working with social media marketing services can be cost effective in saving you time, guesswork and frustration while growing the visibility of your business in the social media.