Building a Better Social Media Brand

If businesses have one goal in mind for 2012 it should be the push for content marketing and social media marketing to achieve greater success through networking. Building a personal brand will shape and determine your success rate for 2012 and ensure an increase of growth for now and beyond.


Forbes.com offered tips from 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, by McGraw-Hill in 2010 and Content Marketing for Dummies by Wiley in 2011 to offer a comprehensive set of skills and ideas to assist companies with continued growth and success within the social media realm.

 

Discover Your Target Audience
Begin taking steps to determine your target audience. Forbes.com suggests visiting sites like Google.com and search probable key words to discover similar brands, content, and businesses aligned to yours.

• Click on these links and explore the multiple sites to learn where your target consumer spends his or her time and money.
• Utilize this time as a fact-finding mission to listen in and see what consumers are saying about these products or services.
• Take the time to learn what topics are interesting them and why it has value.

Businesses can use this information to increase their own strategies and position their product or service to its best advantage.

 

A Journey Begins With One Step: Building the Bridge to Success
Your best strategy to developing a successful social media campaign begins by a formulating a concept and determining how to position your brand within the market:

• Determine the factors that will influence and impact your principal message and shape your national and global image to tailor your specific meaning to your target audience.
• The process of developing customer loyalty and product commitment takes time. Customers have certain expectations and demand a clear message.

• Find a position and stay on course by delivering and promoting a consistent message.

Be a Member of the Team
The idea of social media and how it works for businesses thrives on the idea of engaging your target audience and becoming a dynamic partner in active dialogue. Forbes.com proposes businesses “apply the 80-20 rule of marketing” and avoid self-promotion as your primary activity. Your efforts will be transparent and thus will reflect poorly of your social media skills.

 

The idea of social media is about strengthening bonds and developing relationships with your core audience. Businesses who set a goal to engage their customers in a real-life give and take can expect to expand their business and revenues in a positive way.

 

Now That is Interesting
One step to generating hits and expanding your web presence is by increasing your blogs with fresh and relevant content that target your core audience. With each blog post, you can increase the possibility of better Google positioning through keyword searches.

And, with interesting and fresh blog posts there is a good likelihood a user will share these links via LinkedIn and Facebook as well as other media sites to expand your influence and promote your brand.

 

Bringing it Home

A business must focus on capturing the attention of their target audience and marketing their product in such a way as it does not seem forced. By allowing a natural progression of brand promotion through careful marketing a company can expect to develop and faithful and loyal following. Ask us how we can help you bring customers into the fold.

 

Positioned for Success: Your Best Tips for Succeeding on Twitter and Facebook

As we move swiftly into our second decade of the century, we are reminded of just how important it is to have a strong social media presence and strategy to succeed in today’s ever-increasing competitive business environment. Social media can no longer be ignored. Businesses that do not fully utilize these social media platforms risk being left in the dust by competitors that do understand and appreciate the essential tools of smart social media networking.

Jump into Social Media Success

CBS News recently ran an online article by Dave Johnson which highlighted five steps a company should take to achieve an influential and successful social media campaign. He outlined the steps and goals a company should take to ensure they are on the forefront of this ever-growing social media revolution. Companies should view these tips and see how they can position their business for increased growth and development through a well thought-out strategy and social media campaign that capitalizes on effective communication and customer product and service promotion:

Become a Household Name: The success of your social media campaign depends on developing and establishing a strong presence within the right channels to engage your customer base. Establish business pages on sites such as LinkedIn and Google+ as well as Facebook and Twitter to begin the process of building a strong customer following.
 
Rate Your Success: Analytical tools such as Google Analytics as well as packages, such as Hootsuite, can quantify your results and give you a detailed daily analysis based on hits and customer origins. Dave Johnson suggests that, if your resources allow for a professional social media strategy, you should consider engaging a company, such as SayItSocial.com, to handle determining your rates of success. 


Professional Services: As with determining your success rate, if your budget allows, consider engaging a professional social media team to create and implement a savvy and persuasive social media campaign. Oftentimes, your current employees are not equipped to handle the onslaught and responsibilities of a comprehensive campaign. In addition, running a large-scale social media campaign can take away from their regular duties and diminish other aspects of your company’s performance. This is a particular specialty of Flyline Search Marketing with extensive quantifiable results among our growing clientele.

Let the World Know What You are Up To: On your next trip to the printers, be sure to add links to all of your printed material. This should include brochures, web sites, flyers, business cards and any other sources of communication. The more you can advertise your presence the better.
 
Define Success: You must establish and set goals with your social media campaign. There are no cookie-cutter outlines to follow.  Each business must develop a comprehensive business plan that addresses their unique social media needs and define clear objectives from within this plan.