Do you use social media? And if not, why not? Surely by now you know that social media is THE way to brand yourself in this brave new world of online marketing. When you have identified a niche market and positioned yourself to fill it, the next step is getting the word out – and social marketing is the best way to do that. The world is full of people who need what you have to offer, so why not go find them?
Social media has a huge advantage over mass marketing or even television or Google AdWords ads because people TELL you upfront what they are interested in and you can quickly target and build a following of people directly interested in your niche!
Twitter is rapidly becoming the place to promote several different brands or niches, as they allow multiple accounts. You can build followers for each niche, and implement hash tags to increase your converts for each category. This also helps when it comes to Keyword Research – Twitterers are people who search online, and the way they search can be extremely enlightening and give you ideas for additional keywords.
Facebook only lets you have one profile, but you can build multiple pages and groups and build a following that way. Increase your visibility and move your brand slowly away from your private profile. Use your interconnected social sites to bounce info back and forth – send peopel from twitter to your Facebook pages and vice versa. Use a blog to post stuff you hope will go viral, and have to option to Stumble, Digg or otherwise promote your work.
Retweets, linking, bookmarking and many other factors come into play once you start getting the word out there. The British sensation SleepTalkinMan only took a few days to get on UK telly after his wife started blogging about his night-time ramblings. You too can become the next big thing if you learn how to properly leverage social media and find something new and intriguing to bounce off the popular sites.
Last but not least, don’t forget that you can always use the friendship of others to help boost you, if you don’t blog or socialize online, but have a friend who texts tweets from her Blackberry, ask for a hook up. Let an enthusiast help you out. If needed, hire a professional SEO /SEM firm – most of the best ones now offer social media as part of their marketing approach as well as for SEO.
Tags: branding, SEM, SEO, social media