Using Social Media Marketing to Build Your Business

Social marketing is the latest trend in internet marketing, helping individuals and businesses grow their leads and client base. The trend has been growing dramatically with the tightening of marketing budgets, employee lay-offs, and retiring boomers turning to the web to start their next career or generate additional income.

According to ComScore’s August 2008 report, Facebook and MySpace were the two fastest growing sites on the web from June 2007 to June 2008. Latin America has the highest rate of growth in using Facebook at 1055% vs. North America’s measly 38%. However, in terms of total number of unique visitors to Facebook, North American still leads the world with 49,248,000 vs. Latin America’s 11,931,000 in 2008. Europe came in second with 35,263, 000.

Social marketing (also called attraction marketing) is what helped get President Obama elected. Through videos on YouTube, viral marketing campaigns launched by groups such as MoveOn.org, and individuals hosting rallies and parties locally, his marketing reach was unprecedented in the history of presidential campaigns.

You can use these same tools to attract customers to your business and monetize your site if that’s of interest. Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace are just three of the many social networking sites online now. Others include LinkedIn, Twitter, Squidoo,Plaxo Pulse, Ning, Xing, and Konnects. First, decide which two or three sites to use. If you have a website, you’ll want to link to that. If you don’t, consider at least setting up a blog. You can set up a blog for free on Google Blogger or WordPress (the blogger I’m using here). Both are easily customizable to fit your needs.

Take the time to think first about what your business purpose is. What’s the ultimate goal? Is it to promote your website? Do you want to sell products or services online? Do you want to promote yourself as a speaker or subject matter expert? What’s the main purpose of your business, and what do you want to achieve with attraction marketing? Write it down on paper.

Next, do some research. If you don’t already know who your target market is, check out your competition and think about who would buy your and their products and/or services. What are their ages, incomes, aspirations, interests, needs? Again, write it down. You’re beginning to paint a picture of the purpose for your business and your preferred customer.

Now think about what success looks like. How would you measure success? By the number of phone calls, orders, product sales? By dollar volume in sales? By the number of unique subscribers to your blog or website? Write that down, too.

Then check out the various social marketing sites I mentioned earlier and see who’s using them. Are they your target market? You can get some demographic data online about the different site visitors from companies like ComScore, too. Here’s an example from Rapleaf of the gender and age of social networkers.

Choose one to start with and set up your profile. Choose a blog site like Blogger or WordPress and set up your account. Write your first blog. Then link the social networking site to your blog. A great resource to help you in this process is Renegade University. From there you’ll get a wealth of information about internet and network marketing. Here’s another great resource about the 7 Great Lies About Network Marketing. It’s fascinating.

This is just a start to get you up and on the web. If you need help, give me a call at 858-357-9600, ext. 5 or e-mail me at jeri.denniston@hainescentre.com.