by John Eberhard
The last few weeks I’ve been writing mostly about social media marketing, on a good overall strategy and which sites you should concentrate on. In this article I’m going to give some more tips on some of the top social media sites.
The key on Facebook is first of all to get a lot of “friends.” You propose to someone that they be your Facebook “friend.” My advice is to start out with your actual friends, then start looking at their friends lists and add more of your friends. Then start adding people who have a certain number of friends in common but that you don’t know personally (I do this for people who have 20 common friends). A very small number will write back to you and say “Do I actually know you?” but most will just approve you. For those who write say “No, but we have a lot of friends in common.” Only the most uptight will refuse even then. I have built up 1,700 friends this way.
Having a lot of friends will allow you to promote your business, although you have to do it in a certain way. You can post “status updates” which contain data about what you’re doing business-wise. Such as:
- I just finished designing a new web site (with a link to it)
- I am working on managing client pay per click advertising
- Here is my new video on YouTube (with a link)
- Here is a new ebook I am offering (with a link)
I have observed that if you are linking to something, especially to some kind of property like a book or white paper or something, that tends to generate more interest.
But you can’t keep posting the same thing every day or even post things about your business all the time. Intersperse it with personal stuff, such as things about your recent vacation or your kids or comments about other things. If you use the status update to hammer people about your business offerings all the time, they will “un-friend” you or there is an option to hide your status updates and they might do that.
You can also start a corporate page on Facebook. The way they intended people use the site is that each account is for a person, but for companies, you start a corporate or fan page. Then get your friends to become fans of your business page. The corporate pages can contain your company info and contact info, pictures, videos, and it can link to your blog so that every new blog post appears on the corporate page.
With Twitter, you write updates about what you’re doing or post comments about things. But you only have 140 characters to do it. On Twitter want to get a lot of people following you.
One of the first things you want to do on Twitter is seek out your actual friends. You can look them up and find them. You can also go to sites like WeFollow.com and choose to follow various celebrities, musicians, news organizations and so on. You can also use Twitter’s search function, enter some keywords there, and see who is posting things on that topic, then choose to follow them.
Now you start posting things on Twitter about what you are doing, keeping it under 140 characters each time. Use different keywords in the post, describing what you are doing with your business.
By using keywords that you think other people might look up using the search function, you will now start getting people to follow you who have an interest in what you are doing. I have been doing this using keywords like “pay per click advertising,” “social media,” “web design” and so on, and have been getting a fair amount of followers added each day.
I have also observed that if you add a link to some kind of property that you have produced, like I mentioned before, such as a book, video, ebook or whatever, that seems to really increase the number of people following you.
Summary
One of the key aspects of marketing is the collection of identities. Your friends on Facebook and your followers on Twitter are identities to whom you can promote your business offerings.
As mentioned you should show some judgment on how you do this. Don’t hammer them all the time with the same offerings. Intersperse it with personal stuff or comments about current events. Observe how others do it. You have to stay real with the general agreement of how that site is operated.
But if you do that, these sites can be a powerful way to reach new people with your message.
