Making Mistakes with Social Media
It’s such a minefield, isn’t it? How do you set foot into the social media world without making mistakes, even if you are the most hardened industry veteran? The question often asked is how do you market using social media? The blunt answer is, effectively, that you don’t! At least you don’t in the more traditional sense of the word. Enter subtlety…
You may have read our blog on Monday (Top Hits on Microsoft’s Bing) on how Twitter was the second most popular term searched this year through Microsoft’s Bing search engine (Michael Jackson being number one). This shows the explosion of social media and the interest in this microblogging platform as a way of communication in the New World. Off-line marketers could be forgiven for salivating at the thought of engaging clients, both old and new through platforms such as Twitter and many have jumped headlong into the fray, blasting out and tweeting direct marketing messages to the world. This is a major mistake and one which is guaranteed to turn off both your existing clients and anyone who might be tempted to do business with you. Social media is not social marketing and it should be viewed from a very different perspective.
I mentioned subtlety and this should be your keyword. The fact that you are engaging in social media circles is effectively marketing enough for you. In other words, your presence is your marketing tool. By all means provide great quality information and get involved with a conversation relevant to your product or service, but never, ever direct sell something. Note that the minute you do this, you have lost all the credibility and trust that you have been working hard to build up through these social media channels.
Any messages that you send out into the social media world should be relevant to the people you are sending it to and the channels that you are using. If you come across, over time, as the purveyor of good news and information, relevant and usable and at no cost, you will build up a following of sorts, which will in time be convertible to sales. There is nothing wrong in sending interested parties to a URL, so long as the contents of the landing page are appropriate, relevant, educational, informative, enlightening or entertaining. This page should not be an out and out sales page, although subtle links to your more sales-orientated offers or solutions can be contained elsewhere on these pages.
Don’t try and short-circuit the process by paying individuals to authenticate your wares, one way or the other. Be creative and come up with a great, service orientated social media campaign and treat this form of subtle marketing correctly.
What lessons have you learned using social media?
Matthew Toren
Social media is a great tool, and pretty simple to use to your benefit.
Have conversations, build relationships. and be careful what you say since it will always be out there to help or hurt you and your brand.
I agree with John that social media and social networking sites could give a lot of good things, everything we need to do is use them wisely. Accepting all, commenting all, doing it all - that is no the way, you need to be smart, at least just a little bit. And everything will go smoothly.
Social media is very popular for promotion just because it is free. But, we need to stay away from spamming because, your url can be banned for little mistakes.
Thanks for the great content and information. I am always browsing the internet looking for good content to get ideas for my easy home based business opportunity blogs and articles. You have some real good content here so just keep on doing what you are doing as good stuff like this is always hard to find.
I agree with John that social media and social networking sites could give a lot of good things, everything we need to do is use them wisely
Yes, social medial is most popular promotion. I use only Facebook for my site.
I was always taught “never direct sell” on Twitter
Its shocking how many messages I get from people I follow or who follow me that are just “buy my product now”
It makes me want to delete them right away
I agree with John, Social media is very popular for promotion just because it is free. And it is also provides so many good thing which we wants, But, we need to stay away from spamming because, your url can be banned for little mistakes.