Social Media & Social Media Marketing

Get connected using Social Media

From the moment Barack Obama started Twittering, Social Media hit boom time. However many businesses are cautious as to what benefits it has, confused by the myriad of websites available and concerned about the amount of effort it may take.

Simply explained, Social Media has introduced another dimension to marketing, complementing the traditional ‘Push’ marketing approach with a ‘Pull’ approach generated from digital media web users. Both are about driving brand awareness and generating leads however Social Media has the potential to target appropriate niches in ways never possible with traditional marketing techniques. It can also form a key part of your existing customer support service providing micro blog updates or creating community sites with valuable content, forums and chat facilities for your customer base.

Business Social Media should form an intrinsic part of your marketing mix. Simply diving in without thought and spamming random Social Media sites with your latest offers or bargains is very unlikely to work and can be damaging to your brand as well as the potential for contradiction to your marketing strategy. A Social Media Campaign should be planned, managed and organised as part of your marketing strategy and content researched to stimulate your audience to investigate you and your business further via your website.

Many aspects of a Social Media campaign, such as Keyword Research, rely on the same techniques to SEO and in fact can improve your Google Page Ranking, Amplify recommend a combined common strategy to both to maximise your return and minimise cost.

Social Media Explained

Social Media consists of several online marketing techniques:

Blogging
Blogs are effectively free dynamic websites. A static website can be taken to the next level by introducing a Blog and does not reply on a web developer to publish content. Because the content is updated so often, search engines are encouraged to index them more frequently than static sites assisting your SEO. Blogging does not have to be onerous, in fact less frequent blogging with quality content will generate better results. However simply embedding a blog into your website is not enough, it must be marketed which can be achieved using Blog Directories, linking your blog in Social Networking sites and other online media.

Micro Blogging
Twitter is increasing in popularity at an extraordinary rate and with the correct strategy, can be a very useful tool to reach a wide, relevant audience. Your blogs and articles can form the basis of a content library and posts can be automated. However, regular participation is the best way to build a Twitter Following, retweeting and replying to the posts of others. There are also directories and tools to generate a significant following and promoting your business Twitter account on your website will create additional followers.

Social Networking
Sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Buzz and Ning are principally about promoting you as an expert and thought leader in your field which has a knock on effect through to your business. Additional business promotion can be achieved by creating Pages or Lenses for your business in sites such as Facebook and Squidoo. Contributing to the appropriate forums within these sites creates prestige for individuals within your business which in turn creates traffic to your website. Participating on business forums, blogs, online media sites and trade sites are also excellent ways to generate noise, people’s natural inquisitiveness will result in visits to your profile and website.

Link Building
Websites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and del-icio-us are known as Social Bookmarking sites. The idea behind them is to post links, with tags and a short description to interesting website pages within categories on the site. Users search on tags and will bookmark posts of interest. Your website content gets marketed online and importantly each additional bookmark generates a backlink from a high ranking website to your website which improves Page Ranking dramatically.

Social Video and Podcasts
Social Video sites such as YouTube are hugely popular and are increasingly used as a source of information, essentially a Video Search Engine. Creating a good quality video showcase of your business and posting it to a video site provides another avenue for a potential customer to find you and embedding the video in your website adds to its quality and prestige.

Podcasts are also a useful tool to showcase your business or products and if available for download on your website, can allow an visitor to learn more about you without being at their desk.

Article Marketing and Online PR
Article Marketing is a great way of getting your ideas and opinions found online. By posting unique keyword rich article content on high page ranking article sites such as Ezinearticles.com, you stand a better chance of those all important Page 1 search engine results. Viewers of the article will examine your profile and follow links through to your website. Online PR is also an excellent and cheaper way of getting your articles and press releases in front of traditional media journalists for potential publishing or interviews.

Establishing a Social Media Campaign

As with any marketing strategy or campaign, Social Media requires detailed research, planning, management and measurement to be successful. Anyone can create accounts with Social Media sites and start participating, however you run the risk of running out of things to say and potentially contradicting other marketing material which can be detrimental to your brand. , in order to ensure that your Social Media presence is aligned with your traditional marketing strategy, campaigns, collateral and website you need:

• A Defined Marketing Strategy
• Focus areas of your business to promote
• Business Mind-mapping to develop topics
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Business and individual keyword rich biographies
• A Social Media friendly website with appropriate landing pages
• Keyword researched Collateral Libraries
• Online research to establish appropriate platforms
• Noise Monitoring and Online Listening
• Social Media account creation aligned with roles and responsibilities
• Audience generation and online participation
• Automated Monitoring and KPI’s
• Continual improvement

You may have noticed that there are a number of elements in a Social Media campaign that align very closely with Search Engine Optimisation and Amplify provide a combined service that will save you money, remove duplication and reduce effort whist maximising results and ROI. Our Website Development services also mean we can be a one stop shop for your entire digital marketing requirements.

Amplify are experts in Social Media and can help you develop a long running and successful Social Media campaign for your business. We provide Social Media Consulting Services to help you develop an effective presence and we can also provide an Outsourced Social Media service to manage your campaigns together with content generation with our Public Relations partner AgilityPR.

For more information or for a free initial consultation Contact Us or call Amplify on 02392 822254.