Create a social media marketing strategy plan

Do you have a social media marketing strategy or plan or are you simply signing up for social media sites without any idea of what to do with them?

Don't be embarrassed to admit you haven't got a clue! 99% of people using social media for marketing are just winging it too.

Unfortunately the drain on your productive time can be immense if you don't start working smarter and create a plan for your business with an effective social media marketing strategy.

Facebook Linked In You Tube

1. Your social media marketing strategy should be paced over several months.

You are better off to start with one or two social media sites and get some quality content on them first than to sign up for 20 sites and have nothing much on any of them except your favourite music and movies.  That won't move your business forward!

2. Start with Twitter.

Start learning to use Twitter well first. It requires only 2 lines per post. Two tweets a day is enough to start building content with. That's only 4 lines a day.

People are not precious about accepting followers or following you back so it is easy to build a community.This can sometimes be used to find friends in other social media sites.

There are dozens of applications you can use to spread your twitter comments into other social marketing sites. There are simple applications  to do auto posting to twitter and to auto add new friends.

3. Then Facebook, Linked In or You Tube

Depending on your business the next main social media  sites to tackle for marketing are Facebook, Linked In and You Tube.

Facebook terms of use require a real person to be behind a profile and does not want people to have multiple profiles. To have a company profile there, a real person must sign up and then create a company page. So make sure that if you want to create a company page that the person creating it enables other people to administer the page and retires from it if they leave the company.

Facebook is a social site with games to play and lots of applications for recreation including the sharing of pictures, music and video.

Linked In likewise is a real person site. You should ask several employees to create a linked in profile if using this site for promotion, but also understand that their profile is their own. The networking they do here can work both ways. It can spread the good word about your company but your employees can be head hunted by unscrupulous competitors.

Linked In is what I call a resume site. It is for business networking and the content placed there should be somewhat formal and include  educational qualifications and links to sites where business type profiles can be seen.

You Tube is the major video sharing site. You can choose any user name so a company name is fine, no real person required. The quality of videos you upload should be good as people give short attention to people who waste their time with videos that pause or waffle or hype sell.

A video does not have to be long and complex, a simple slide show type video is fine, so long as the information is both entertaining and informative.

Then What?

It all depends on what media you want to use and how much time you have.

NB. The major aim of the game is to get links. The secondary aim is to build communities and "funnel" them to an important page.

This is similar to putting advertising in newspapers, or signposts by the roadside. You need to decide where your market is and what they are looking for. You entertain them or solve their small problems using content in the form of videos, articles, FAQs, audios etc. You place this on a variety of social media sites and get the link back to your main social media sites and to your main site.

Primary Rule: If you provide good content, people follow the links.

The following articles talk about some successes and failures of social media marketing strategies using You Tube, Twitter and other social media sites.

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