What has always been the most effective way to generate home based business? Referrals from existing customers to their friends and families.
Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive & most productive form of advertising. Most people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only 1 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a positive return on investment. No one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers will make a purchasing decision in line with the input of family and friends.
Social media marketing supplies the electronic platform for referral marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and is linked to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets go out every week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more prevalent today through social media marketing than any other amount of time in the history of business. Can your organization afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?
If you’re like me, you learn from making mistakes. However, when you can study from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. Why not study from the mistakes of others? Here are a few common mistakes new marketers make when trying to create and implement a social media plan:
I’ll figure it out when i go- the biggest time waster is going right into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take time to get educated on social media sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you learn a site, learn all of the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will lead to many business owners abandoning their plan and walking from the strategy. Instead, learn Personal Growth of setting up these site, understand the different options, and spend your time engaging rather than fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs out there that are designed to teach business owners on how best to create and implement a social media plan.
Let’s add 100 sites in a single day- it’s tempting to venture out and develop a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at once. But the problem with this strategy is that should you grow too fast, you won’t be able to keep up with all the great things about 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, participate in events, and engage with 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 easier 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 possess complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, lots of people will find you before they find your website. If they find your site and you have a pic of your logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most importantly, be personable.
Here’s the pitch- here’s the biggest stumbling block for some beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This sort of media is really a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices are a dying breed and trying to imitate these ineffective methods on a fresh medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Rather than selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself as an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For instance, if you are an agent, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to sell a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By providing valuable information, you will become an expert on the subject. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell his / her house, they will probably ask for your services.
Same method of communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people like to read, others like video, plus some people will be drawn to pictures on your site. The main element is to mix up how you post. If you simply put out a blog each day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it up a little. For those who have a blog one day, then put up a straightforward video another. 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 is to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, you’ll find it’s easier to have 1 post per day than 3 days with 10 posts.
Do it all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I’d use to communicate with people. Needing to log into multiple accounts each day to check the emails became annoying, frustrating, and ineffective. The fact is, it became to time consuming to get this done 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 utilize the benefits of email. Exactly the same applies to social media. When you have to log into and log from 5 different social media marketing sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools which will enable you to log into all your social media makes up about interactions may be the easiest way to make sure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are some good all-in-one social media dashboards that will allow you to streamline your accounts and social networking efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner looking to create a social media plan for your business, you then absolutely should educate yourself on how to utilize the technology and find tools to work with you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to create a house and you don’t possess a hammer, that house isn’t going to get built. By taking the steps listed above in this post, it is possible to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media plan.