Use Programs that Work Together

Delicious and Twitter are excellent examples of this. If there’s a news story, or a sale, that I want to put on twitter, but also spread out on the Social Bookmarking sites, I use Delicious. When you create a Delicious bookmark you can set it to simultaneously send out a Tweet on the same topic with the URL automatically shortened thanks to bit.ly. It’s a great way to hit two birds with one stone. And yes, that was a Twitter pun.

Automatically Schedule Your Releases

A big part of maintaining a high profile online is to regularly generate new content. In the warp-speed paced world of Twitter and Facebook, this gets exhausting pretty fast. An easier way to manage this is to use Hootsuite to write a week’s, or even a month’s, worth of tweets and schedule them to be released daily. This is just one small facet of everything that Hootsuite can do, by the way. Unfortunately, no similar program exists for Facebook (that I am aware of).

Use One Program to Check Your Web Presence

These days, if you want an online presence you have to have a Blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a Squidoo lens, you have to comment on other people’s accounts, tweets, and blogs, as well as add respond to your own comments, etc, etc. It’s a lot of work, and it can quickly become overwhelming just trying to keep track of all the conversation’s going on at once. Fortunately, there are programs like Social Mention. The people who came up with this one deserve to be canonised. Social Mention can run a highly-refineable search through the entire Social Media Jungle and report back with every little post or tweet that has your search term in it.

About the Author:
Jonathan Meier is the Marketing and Social Media Coordinator for O Hotel Suites. He has received a degree in Communications Studies from the University of Calgary and is now, miraculously, employed in a related field. When he’s not at the Hotel dealing with the daily dose of craziness he’s usually out in the mountains near his hometown of Canmore where he can be seen climbing, skiing, or doing anything at all that doesn’t involve computers.

1. Social Marketing for Business: Hit pay dirt following these three simple (not easy) steps
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Whether you are just getting started in social marketing or have been testing out the waters with few victories, the one thing you need to achieve social marketing success for your business is a game plan. Randomly joining social networks and submitting content without purpose can be time-consuming and ineffective. However, don’t think that your plan must be complicated and professionally-designed in order for you to succeed. In fact, these three simple (although not always easy) steps, can help you to hit pay dirt in no time.

Step One: Set a Firm Foundation with Solid Keyword Research and a USP.

It is imperative to identify a keywords list and use those keywords to attract search engine spiders. There are free tools available to make finding the right keywords for your business a snap. One such tool is the Google Keyword Tool. Here, you can find the keywords people are plugging into the search engines as well as what your competitor websites are using.

Once you have identified the keywords and phrases best for your niche and business, you must add them to everything you do: domain names, blogs, article titles, and content. The search engines will pick up on these keywords and with quality content you have a great chance of receiving a higher ranking, which will put you at the top of the search engine results—right where you want to be.

Finding the right keywords to use helps you to create the all-important Unique Selling Proposition (USP). As you consider being unique and setting yourself apart from the competition, it makes sense to choose keywords that are popular yet do not have the most competition. For example, a website selling wheelchairs could focus on “wheelchair” as the top keyword, but there would be significant competition for that keyword. However, using the words “quickie wheelchair” helps to gain more targeted traffic and side-steps the primary competitors.

In addition to targeting unique keywords, you will want to offer a unique selling proposition. This means you want to offer a solution to your target market that somehow stands out and is different than what you competitor’s can offer. Whether it is a special service, bonus products or a cutting-edge solution, make sure you are offering you customers something of value that is solving a problem or meeting a need.

Once you become familiar with the Google Keyword Tool, you can begin utilizing more sophisticated tools such as Market Samurai, Niche Bot, Wordtracker and many others. You will also want to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to reverse engineer your competitors’ sites. With this you can find out who their customers are and then target the high PR value sites for you own linking strategy.

Step Two: Establish Your Marketing Branding and Communication Touch Tones

Developing a brand for your business is one of the most important steps you can take in securing customers and making the sale. Your brand is the essence of who you are, how you differ from your competitors and why a customer should choose to do business with you.

So what is a brand? It’s more than your name, motto or the colors of your banner. It is a culmination of all of the different aspects of your business. In order to create a brand you must consistently communicate your business mission and purpose as well as promote a consistent image, personality and voice to your target market.

The idea of communication touch tones goes hand-in-hand with your brand. To have a cohesive brand that works, you must fine-tune your communication styles so that the customer can hear something about you, read a tag line, see a logo or banner ad, and know it is your business. This consistency and uniformity throughout all of your social marketing communications creates trust and loyalty in your customers—these are the keys to a solid business.

Furthermore, you want to ensure your brand identity can be differentiated from your competitors’. You want to stand out and offer something unique to customers. Focus on really plugging in your primary and secondary target keywords to reach your desired customer.

Step Three: Implement Social Media Layers Effectively

It is far too easy to get distracted when it comes to social marketing for business. The social media networks are seemingly endless and there is always a new guru touting the best new method for conquering social marketing once and for all. Here’s the thing: if you can just buckle down, create something of value, know your target market and develop the content pumps for distribution, you are well on your way—no guru necessary!

As you are searching for the right venues for your content, try to start by identifying two of the most appropriate social media sites for your niche and target market. Explore the forums and blogs to find out which ones seem to be more active. Ask yourself: who are my ideal customers? Which social media sites do they use? Once you have narrowed it down to two sites, become a member there and follow other members who seem to have a great following and have similarities to your niche or marketing style.

Get a handle on what works for specific social media sites and then prioritize the ones you have chosen. The next step is simply pumping out the high quality content to these sites in order to quickly establish your reputation as a business that offers something of value.

Keep in mind that social media sites are not the place to spam, posting copies of blogs or articles from other sites or just offer remixed articles. Be original. Be unique. And set yourself apart from the competition with creative and compelling social marketing campaigns.

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