Social Media Marketing
Whether you are a content marketer, an author or in charge of marketing strategy for your business, you have to see social media marketing as a major part of your marketing strategy. You need to make sure that you are using social media as a marketing tool instead of just a lackadaisical way to keep in touch with people.
Using social media marketing effectively
Maybe it’s because social media has become a major social vehicle but many still don’t see it as a true branding and marketing tool. They still see it as just a way to broaden their circle of friends.
While this may be true when it comes to something like your basic Facebook profile, you can’t ignore the fact that social media is an excellent vehicle to get your brand message across. And best of all, to a large extent you can use social media as a free tool to get your brand’s message across.
But doing this requires some skill. In order to be effective, social media marketing needs a strategy in place. This ensures that, while you are communicating to the social community in a less formal way, you still keep your ultimate marketing goals in mind.
One of the greatest benefits to social media marketing as opposed to any other form of marketing, is that it can be run on a very small budget. No other form of marketing has the ability to deliver such positive results with so little or sometimes even no monetary outlay.
Different platforms for social media marketing
Whilst there are hundreds of different forms of social media marketing you can utilize, as an author or content marketer the most obvious ones you would use are:
Google+
YouTube
It will be best to use these in conjunction with each other, incorporating the branding and marketing strategies you use with one, into the other. In this way they will cross pollinate and you will get maximum effect from your social media marketing efforts. However, don’t waste time with platforms that don’t deliver results to you. It’s important that you do some research and then concentrate your efforts on three or four platforms that will deliver the results you want.
Before you jump in with both feet, you need to first learn a few basics about each of these social media platforms. You don’t want to waste time or even do damage to your brand by doing it wrong. You also need to learn how to put together a social media marketing strategy so that you don’t waste any time while online but that you are actually able to convert the time and effort you put into your social media marketing into sales.
Many companies now make use of full-time social media marketers to run social media for them. As a marketing tool, social media is important enough to justify the expense.