Five Powerful Social Media Marketing Tactics

When it comes to Social Media Marketing, nothing is more powerful than posting links in major social venues for every blog post — especially as Google and other companies dial in “social signals” in their ranking formulas. One great WordPress plugin for this, features the big five social venues — Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon — you can see it in use at the top of this post.

School yourself to click the buttons, along with your core staff and associates for every post you publish — this is the real secret.

1) To get started, join important groups at LinkedIN relating to your industry and participate in discussions there. You want groups that not only contain colleagues, but more importantly prospects who may be interested in your products and services.

2) Find online groups where your clients might hang out and maintain a presence there. At LinkedIn, you might try Property Management Professionals, as a Realtor, for example. With over 7400 members, you will learn more about serving their concerns, and could find leads in your geographic area.

Above is an example of the Social Bookmarking icons that appear at top of posts. Click each one regularly, and post your link to a Social Venue

3) When you click the LinkedIn icon under a post, you will have the opportunity to post it directly to a group you’ve joined at LinkedIn (right).

4) You take similar steps with each of the other buttons that connect you to the networks.  LinkedIn goes pretty fast once you are set up with groups you can engage.  StumbleUpon, not as well known as the others, takes about the same amount of time and authoritative websites like Mashable have reported great traffic results using it.  Then of course, you want to always post to Twitter, Facebook, and the new Google+.  School yourself to click the buttons, along with your core staff and associates for every post you publish — this is the real secret.

Above, you can see how I posted direct to Google+ from this blog — every Content Marketer should have a Google+ account.  Top three reasons:  Google is ranking G+ posts higher than other networks, G+ Brand pages will soon merge with map business pages, and… it’s expected to reach 400 million users in 2012.

Always be Authentic

5) Monitor the buzz about your company, and participate live at Social Media sites – authentic presence leads to real connections and leads. People buy from those they feel they know. So, don’t rely only on redistributed content and links. Make yourself known as a real person with whom prospects would like to do business. I recommend and use HootSuite to efficiently manage  Social Media accounts and will provide training and consulting for same upon request. Your bottom line is new customers for best ROI on your Social Media advertising spend.

BONUS TIP:  Give some serious thought to using a good CRM — Customer Relationship Manager — to nurture the leads you gather. Good ones factor in social media so you can learn what your prospect is buzzing about. We like BatchBook.com for smaller businesses, and SalesForce.com for larger companies. Make sure you cut down on entry typing by embedding a contact form on your website to send leads directly into your customer relationship management tool.