What has always been the simplest 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 least expensive and most productive form of advertising. Most people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only 1 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 will make a purchasing decision based on 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 each week. YouTube has over 100 million views per day. The potential for your message to be spread by raving fans is more frequent today through social media marketing than any other amount of time in the history of business. Can your organization afford not to participate in this marketing revolution?
If you’re like me, you study from making mistakes. However, when you can learn from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. So why not study from the mistakes of others? Here are several common mistakes new marketers make when attempting to create and implement a social media marketing plan:
I’ll figure it out when i go- the biggest time waster is going into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take time to get educated on social networking sites. Not all sites are designed for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all the benefits of the website. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will lead to many business owners abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the basics of setting up these site, understand the various options, and spend time engaging instead of fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs on the market that can teach business owners on how best to create and implement a social media plan.
Let’s add Motivational Content in one day- it’s tempting to venture out and develop a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at one time. But the problem with this particular strategy is that should you grow too fast, you won’t be able to keep up with all the benefits of each site. The very 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 engage with others. If you start up 12 at once, you won’t be as active and your insufficient participation could defeat your current 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 individuals who don’t have complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, many people will find you before they find your website. If they find your site and you also have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or hardly any personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be 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 sort of media is a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional one way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and trying to imitate these ineffective methods on a new 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 instance, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on which they can do to sell a house themselves. The truth is, only a small percentage of individuals 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 their house, they will most likely ask for your services.
Same approach to communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people prefer to read, others like video, and some people will be drawn to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up how you post. If you to put it simply out a blog every day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. Should you have a blog one day, then put up a straightforward 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 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 per month, you’ll find it’s better 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 truly have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I would use to communicate with people. Needing to log into multiple accounts every day to check the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The fact is, it became to frustrating to get this done and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load most of my email accounts into Outlook, I was able to efficiently check and make use of the benefits of email. Exactly the same applies to social media. If you have to log into and log from 5 different social media sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that will allow 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 marketing plan. Again, there are several good all-in-one social media marketing dashboards that will allow 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, you then absolutely should learn how to utilize 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, it will be easy to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media plan.
