Using social media as a marketing tool is all about having a personal interaction with your target audience. With that fact in mind, it might seem like a great idea to show your audience who you are by exposing them to y our personal account. Unfortunately, that idea isn’t as good in practice as it is in theory. The reality of the situation is that your friends and family aren’t necessarily going to address you in a professional manner. Sometimes they might use offensive language, or delve into controversial topics while talking to you on social media sites, and while those things are fine between friends, they don’t go over well with all members of your target audience. By having those conversations with your friends and family on the same account as your professional conversations, you run the risk of alienating some of your customers.

We’ve all done something stupid at some point in our lives. Unfortunately, for some of those stupid moments, one of your friends was on hand with a camera to capture your idiocy on film. If you’ve done something stupid that happened to get photographed, there’s a very good chance it will wind up on Facebook. Your friends will  not hesitate to tag your personal account in the photo in question, and chances are, you don’t want your customers seeing your past mistakes caught on film. If your personal account, and professional account are merged, your customers will have full access to all of the boneheaded things your friends photographed.

Facebook is a powerful marketing tool, but only if you use it correctly. It’s safe to say that merging your personal and professional accounts isn’t the right way to use it. Keep them separate, and you’ll keep your customers interested in you and your products.

Facebook can be an extremely powerful marketing tool if you use it the right way. If you use it the wrong way, all you’re going to do is anger your friends, and get yourself flagged as spam. You can avoid that by following a few simple guidelines. These tips will help to keep you from angering your Facebook friends, and making your way into their spam filters.

Wall Posts

It can be extremely tempting to post your products or services all over your friends’ walls. No matter how strong that urge is, resist it. If you do that, all you’ll achieve is getting your friends to un-friend you. No matter how good your products are, and no matter what kind of bargain you’re offering, no one wants you to post about it on their wall. People want to have conversations with their friends on their walls, and throwing up a random marketing message is a sure fire way to draw a lot of negative attention to yourself. Instead, stick to writing friendly messages on people’s walls, and keep the marketing messages subtle, and keep them to your own wall.

Be Social

If you want attention for your products or services on Facebook, the best way to get it is to be friendly with other users. Make friends, and interact with those friends on a regular basis, and you’ll be on the right track. People use social networks like Facebook as a way to interact with other people, not as a way to learn about new products. If you interact with other users, you can get them interested in you, and by proxy, your products easily.

Talk About Them

Most people really enjoy hearing other people talk about them in a positive way. Take the time to say nice things about your Facebook friends, and the projects they’re working on, and the things they’re doing, and they will be more likely to pay attention to you, and your products. You’d be surprised at how much attention you will get from just a few compliments.

Facebook can be a powerful marketing tool, but only if you avoid alienating and enraging your friends. Follow these tips, and you’ll keep your friends happy and engaged, and ultimately, you’ll get the attention you’re looking for.

Search

Take the time to do regular Twitter and Facebook searches for terms directly related to your niche. These searches will yield valuable information about what your audience is talking about. Take the time to read through the most recent search results for each search you do. Those results will be full of discussions about what’s going on in your niche. Take that information and use it to your advantage. Spend some time writing blog posts about any new information you find, and engage other social media users in discussions about it.

Polls

Social media sites make it very easy to get opinions out of your customers. Take the time to post a poll, and invite your friends, and followers to take the poll. Chances are, if you’ve been using social media the right way, your friends and followers will happily take the time to fill out your poll, and you’ll get a lot of valuable information about your customers’ wants and needs. Polls can include questions about your products, about your company, or just about your niche. Ideally, you should keep your polls relatively short. If you want to have a longer poll, or if you want to ensure that more people will take the poll, offer a prize to one random winner who took the poll.

Ask Questions

Take the time to ask your friends and followers some open ended questions. You can learn a lot from their answers, and by asking them the questions, you’re engaging them in a meaningful conversation. Your friends an d followers will answer your question, and you’ll get valuable feedback, as well as a good boost for your reputation.

By keeping these things in mind, and paying careful attention to what other social media users are talking about, you can learn a lot about your audience.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can be powerful marketing tools. If you’ve been reading this site you already know that, but what you might not realize is that they can actually add to your profits. We’re not talking about selling things directly on social media sites, but rather using them to generate more sales through your existing website.

Before you start using social media, it’s important to decide what you want to get out of it. You can use it for a lot of different things, like customer service, market research, and of course, attracting more sales. You can combine these goals to create your own social media marketing strategy, but we’re going to focus directly on the sales methods you can use on social media.

A lot of topics we’ve already covered on this site apply to the process of using social media to generate sales. You still have to be friendly with other users, and you still can’t over post about your own site. When you’re using social media to generate sales, you have to draw people to your website, and you have to entice them to purchase your product. Do this by making posts about new benefits of your products, and posting links to your site whenever you can. Remember not to go overboard with these posts, as they can give your friends and followers the impression that you’re a spammer if you post them too often. In the right amount, posts about your products, their benefits, and your website will draw more people to your site, and encourage sales.

If you want to use social media to generate sales, keep these things in mind. Don’t overpost about your products or your website, stay active on social media sites, be friendly with other users, and post about your products and website. Keep all of that in mind, and you’ll begin to drive more traffic to your website, and ultimately, more sales.

Username

You should use a username that indicates who you are, and what you’re all about. If you plan to market multiple projects on your social media accounts, you might want to pick a memorable username that isn’t directly related to any of your projects, or you might want to use some variation of your name as your username. Whatever username you wind up picking, remember to use it on every social media site you sign up for. That way, people that know you on one wist will have an easy time identifying you on another site. If your reputation spans multiple sites, you’ll find it much easier to get started each time you sign up for a new social media site.

Profile Picture

Your profile picture is another way you can make it easy for other social media users to identify you. A lot of people will tell you to use a professional head shot whenever you sign up for a social media site, but that’s not necessarily the right thing to do. Your niche is going to dictate what type of picture you use. For example, if your marketing products related to party planning, you might want to use a picture of some balloons and streamers as your profile picture. Sure, sometimes you will want to use that professional head shot, but it’s far more important that your profile picture be memorable than traditionally professional. That being said, avoid using anything obscene or vulgar. It’s OK to use something fun, it’s not OK to use something offensive.

Information

Take the time to fill out your profile completely. Social media users are out to interact with other people, and engage them in a conversation. If you share some information about yourself with them, they’ll find it much easier to engage you in a conversation. The more you share about yourself, the better off you’ll be.

Social media marketing is extremely challenging, but if you get off to a good start, you’ll have an easier time with it further down the line. Keep these tips in mind when setting up your profiles, and you’ll get off to the right start with social media.

One of the goals of a strong social media marketing campaign is to spread information about your products and services to potential customers.  There are certain rules you need to follow when sharing your content on social media in order to ensure that other people will notice it. If you share every piece of content from your website on social networking sites, your content won’t get the kind of attention you wan tit to.

Frequency

If you share your content too often, your friends and followers will begin to lose interest in the links you share. If your friends and followers stop paying attention to your links, it won’t matter how many of them you send out – no one will be clicking on them. Make sure your links are balanced out by other types of posts. Talk to other users, post information from other sites, and just be active on the social media sites you use. Once you’re using social media in the right way, start throwing in one link a day to your own site, or product. If that link is balanced out by other types of posts, it will get some attention. As time goes on you might want to start posting more than one link to your site each day, but only if you’re making a lot of other posts to counterbalance the increase in promotional posts.

Quality

Some new additions to your website just aren’t going to be that interesting to your social media friends and followers. Those updates might be necessary, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be well received by your audience as a whole. Try to determine which updates are going to be interesting to your audience, and stick to posting just those updates to your social media accounts. If each link to your site that you share is interesting, your friends and followers will be more likely to click links to your site in the future.

By carefully managing both the quality, and the quantity of the links to your site that you share on social media sites, you can ensure that the links you share will get more attention. The more people that click your links, and read your content, the better off you’ll be.

Incoming Traffic

Pay close attention to your incoming traffic on your website. If you see a spike in sales, and an increase in traffic coming in from social media sites like Twitter, and Facebook, then there’s a good chance those things are related. Keeping an eye on where your traffic is coming from can help you to determine where your sales are coming from, so pay careful attention to your incoming traffic.

New Friends And Followers

Each time someone becomes your Facebook friend, or starts following you on Twitter, you’re exposing one more person to your brand, and your products. Keep track of how many friends you gain, and lose in any given month, and pay careful attention to how those numbers shift over time. Your friend and follower counts will help you to determine your overall appeal on social media sites. The more friends and followers you gain, the better you’re doing. Just remember, it’s important to get those friends and followers through natural methods, rather than paying for a large quantity of them. Buying friends and followers in bulk is a sure fire way to ensure that you’re getting a lot of new friends and followers that won’t care about your products or services.

Messages

Are people talking to you? Are you answering them when they do? Social media is all about being social, and if you’re interacting with other users on a regular basis, then you’re doing something right. Pay close attention to the conversations you’re having on social media sites, and you’ll have a good idea of how interested your friends and followers are in what you have to say.

Keep a close eye on these stats, and you’ll be able to track your social media marketing campaign effectively. The more you know about your friends and followers and how they’re interacting with you, the better off you’ll be in the long run.

Having a call to action is essential in almost every advertising medium. If you do not create an incentive for someone to buy your product, look at your photograph, or come into your store, they simply will choose another option, that better grabbed their attention and better enticed them to lean their way.

A call to action is a simple thing, it is asking the client, the reader, or the viewer to do a specific task.

An example of this would be a politician calling out their district to make it better through volunteering. If for example, a Senator from Michigan came home and made an address that Michigan needs to start supporting a new industry, they are calling their state to action. Their goal is to motivate them to do something, whether it be to support Boeing to build a plant in Michigan or to volunteer at their local homeless shelter.

As you can see, a call to action can be a very broad definition, and it can also be used in social media marketing as well.

A great example of a call to action is of a small town local news website that was trying to increase their readership. Instead of trying to buy their readers using Google Adwords (which is another great option), they tried to gain readers through Facebook. They created a Facebook page and created a call to action. The call to action was to invite all of your family and friends on Facebook to join the group. The incentive? They were going to donate a set amount of money to their local Hospice non profit to support their cause. The result? Over 1,500 Facebook fans later, I would say it was a success. A member of the community even matched their donation and joined in full force to help the cause. That is a successful use of a call to action.

Things to focus on for your social call to action:

• Give your readers a reason to want to take action.
• Sell the action, create a true incentive for them to take it.
• Create a social cause, donate 1/2 the profit to charity for a certain day.
• Make it viral, have a good reason for people to want to share it.
• Do the work so the viewer doesn’t have to. Don’t make them jump through hoops, make it as easy as possible for them.

A good call to action sells, a poor one will only hinder your process of reaching your goals, test more than one and figure out what works best for you.

Keywords, And Content

If your visitors are coming in through a search engine, and leaving immediately, it might be because your keywords and your content don’t match up correctly. If your visitors are arriving at your site from a particular search term, and they’re not finding information directly related to that search term, then they’re going to leave immediately without looking around. In order to avoid this, make sure your content, and your keywords line up with one another. Also, look out for keywords with double meanings. It’s possible for two different things, let’s say a TV show, and a video game, to share a name. If someone arrives at your site looking for information on one, and they find information for the other, they will most likely leave without looking at anything else on your site. Make sure that your content clearly defines what your site is about, and you can avoid issues like these.

Performance

If you see a sudden increase in your bounce rate, and you can’t figure out why, make sure your site is functioning properly. If your site is loading slow, or if it appears broken in some way when a visitor shows up, there’s a good chance they won’t stick around and look at other pages on your site. If the site isn’t loading, or if it isn’t working correctly, your visitors will just leave. Take a look at your site in all the major web browsers, and see how it loads in each. If you’re having technical problems with one browser, that might be the reason for your sudden spike in bounce rate. Once the issue is corrected, chances are things will go back to normal.

Your visitors have expectations about your site before they ever visit it. If your site meets both their content, and performance expectations, then your bounce rate will stay low. If not, your bounce rate will rise. Keep these things in mind if you see a spike in your bounce rate, and you’ll be equipped to deal with it.

Chances are you’ve seen a business card with a Twitter address on it by now. This is a relatively new practice, and it’s not for everyone. There are a few things to consider before deciding to put your Twitter address on your business card.

Your Job

Think about what you do for a living before putting your Twitter account on your business card. If you’re in sales or marketing, then there’s a good chance that you want to be social, and friendly with other people in your industry. If that’s the case, sharing your Twitter information can be a great way to do that. If, on the other hand, you work in a department that doesn’t really merit a lot of social interaction with other people in your industry, you might want to skip the Twitter address. Accountants, for example, don’t have much of a reason to interact socially with other people in the industry they’re currently working in. An accountant working for a textile company doesn’t need other people int he textile industry to know their Twitter info.

Twitter Activity

If you are in a position that calls for networking, you also need to consider how active you are on Twitter. If you’re using Twitter on a daily basis, then putting your Twitter information on your business card is a great idea. If you only use it once in a while, and you’re not quick to respond to messages or @replies, then you might not want to put your Twitter information on your business card. If a new contact sends you an @reply or a direct message on Twitter, and you don’t reply within a reasonable amount of time, they may get a bad impression of you right off the bat.

Twitter is a powerful marketing tool, there’s no question about that. If you’re not an active Twitter user in a job where social networking on the internet is necessary, putting your Twitter information on your business card might not be the best idea. Keep that in mind the next time you’re getting business cards printed, and make your decision about including your Twitter infor carefully.