Using Social Media Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Website

byBibian2

1.2K followers

Updated 6 years ago

What is Social Media Marketing?

In brief, social media marketing is the process of involving in social media networks in order to further build a brand and intensify marketing communication. This type of Internet marketing makes use of various social media communication techniques, including email and instant messaging, forums, online chats, blogging and, podcasting and much more.

A great deal of these techniques have been around for a while, but only in recent years have businesses begun to fully utilize the rich opportunities open to them within social media. Before you take the plunge into the sea of social media marketing, it is best if you learn how to use the tools to your advantage.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

While many of the best known social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were originally created as platforms through which individuals could share with each other, all these platforms are quickly becoming a useful tool for businesses in their efforts to strengthen their brand and reach out to potential clients. Social media marketing provides a number of other benefits, which includes providing businesses with the opportunity to:

• Help users through information, resources and useful tools
• Build brand awareness for firms
• Earn the trust of the online community
• It turns website followers into website visitors, and website visitors into customers

The beauty of Social media marketing is that it is an inexpensive way to reach out, and anyone can do it at any time.

However, to get the most from this business tool, you need to invest some good time in forming a plan of action, understanding how to get started on the right foot and maintaining visibility with your audience.

Your Social Media Marketing Plan

There's a reason social networking/social media is swiftly gaining in popularity in recent years: its fun!

Reaching out and making meaningful connections with various people who share your interests and passions is stimulating. Not only that but, far from being a mindless diversion, it's an immensely productive, fruitful activity if you participate in a structured way.

By approaching your social media in a disciplined way, you can greatly influence your visibility and your reputation and enjoy the various interactions all the way.

Set objectives.

What action do you want your various network or your blog readers to take? What do you want them to get out of their social networking experience with you?

Determine your audience.

Most businesses invest a great deal of time, energy and money during their startup to determine who their prospects are. Put all this to good use in focusing your social media energies on the right target audience.

• Always know what image you wish to project. Are you a pal, an authority or the go-to guy?
• Always determine what real-life profile fits you and your brand in every social media/networking activity.
• Always choose your format(s) properly.
• Always post blogs through blog platforms such as WordPress, Blogger and others.
• Always decide how you'll execute your plan. Will you do it yourself or get help? While various input and insight from you is essential to projecting the brand and the image you want your audience to see, a company with proficiency in online marketing can assist with the technical aspects of setting up profiles, posting, linking and using search engine optimization and to make your communications more visible to search engines.

Getting Started

It is important to go into Social Media Marketing with the right attitude. Yes, Social Media Marketing can be a wonderful way to touch people, make friends and contacts, and influence them to follow you to your website, but it is a subtle art. People can spot deception and an ulterior motive in milliseconds, even online, so approaching Social Media Marketing unselfishly is a must."Give and you shall receive."

It's a mantra you'll likely hear over and over again in the social media world, and it may well be the most important (and challenging) concept to master. It can't be stressed enough:

Every blog, article post and interaction with your social networking contacts should always be focused on how it benefits your audience not your business.

With the various expectations about your motivations properly set, it's time for you to begin introducing yourself to the Web community. You can choose one Social Media Marketing method only if you wish, but a more effective approach is to use a variety of tools to expand your presence. This resource focuses on three:

• Social Networking

• Content Sharing
• Blogging

Social Networking

You may already be using social networking sites to keep up with friends and family.

Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, are among the most popular right now; they are user-friendly and are equipped with a variety of applications and gadgets that make using the sites enjoyable. There are also a number of Social Media Marketing websites that are especially great for business purposes

(Reddit, Del.icio.us, Digg to name a few). Contacts you make through social networking will also often recommend a few of their favorite Social Media Marketing websites.

Always invest some time up front in the construction of your profile, including your biographical information, your photo, objectives, interests, expertise and other professional and personal associations. Use these various topics in the social networking site's search tool to locate people and organizations that have shared interests and associations.

Rather than wait for the conversations to start, introduce yourself, just as one would extend a warm handshake at a party or business convention, offer your hand to the online community. Whether you're using a personal account or your business account or both, be open and transparent, and encourage your new-found friends in the online community to see you a good neighbor and a resource.

Blogging

Blogs are vital for businesses looking to build a presence. Use blog posts on WordPress and other sites as a platform for others by regularly offering up fresh, original information that is of interest and is useful to others. Your contributions to your blog will be far more meaningful and realistic if they focus on giving information and resources to others, rather than hawk your own products or taut your business' attributes.

Indirectly, though, these posts allow you to develop your authority in your industry and also provide readers with a reason and means to visit your site. In addition to providing links to valuable resources, gives your readers a convenient way to reach you for additional support and guidance.

Content Sharing

This has a slight difference from blogging, in that it encompasses not just sharing ideas and information through posts, but also sharing content via other methods and content sharing sites:

• Articles news releases (eReleases, PRNewswire, PRWeb)
• Photos (Flickr)
• Videos ( Yahoo! Video, YouTube, Google Video)
• Whitepapers (Del.icio.us)
• presentations

With each of these methods, be smart about your linking.

Use your social networking page, blog, or content sharing platform to link back to your website, but also link out to these Social Media Marketing resources from your business website.

Maintain Your Social Media Presence

Depending on the amount of time you can set aside for Social Media Marketing, it can take a while to build up something and see real-world results (read "conversions"), but with real effort and patience, all that "paying forward" can pay back in a big way.

If possible, set aside time daily, even if it's some few minutes, to maintain your social media presence.

You may wish to call on the aid of a friend, coworker or an online marketing partner to help manage your Social Media Marketing campaign for you on a regular basis, or at least keep up with it when you're out of town. Some services can provide everything from copywriting services to simple blog posting services so you can get professionally written content as well. If it helps, have a checklist of all the tasks you want to tackle: monitor blogs and social media for activity respond to questions, comments and wall posts post new blog about a chosen topic search for and add new contacts

Results won't happen overnight, but Social Media Marketing is to some degree a "you get out of it what you put into it" proposition. The more you invest in the proposition, the greater the likelihood that you'll realize great business benefits.

Measure Your Success

Ascertaining the effectiveness of your Social Media Marketing campaign isn't necessarily an exact science, but there are ways to know whether or not you're reaching people, or even reaching out to the right people. You can use analytics tools such as Omniture and Google Analytics to measure how many visitors you're getting to your social media sites, how much time and how many pages they're viewing while they're on your site, and whether those guests are following through with a visit to your business website. Many of the social networking and Social Media Marketing websites you join offer their own tools for measuring the volume and type of activities you're attracting with your profile and your activities through that profile.

With or without tools, though, you can point out some trends on your own. Who are the people viewing and commenting on your posts? Do these groups of people fall into your target audience, or are they influencers in your industry? Are you experiencing acceleration in traffic to your own website, or receiving more inquiries or sales? How many people are subscribing to your RSS feeds?

Simple Social Media Marketing Do's and Don'ts

Do ...

• Always be open, honest and unselfish in your use of social media and networking applications.
• Always address issues that are meaningful to your target audience. Put them first.
• Always provide fresh insight and original content.
• Listen to your contacts and respond in a way that is meaningful and useful to them.
• Make ways for people to contact you for additional support.
• Provide links to other useful resources. Always remember that, social media is about what you can do for others.

Don't ...

• Never wait for an invitation: Reach out to your audience.
• Never sneak in a sales pitch. This is a turnoff to people looking for information and support.
• Never talk too much about yourself or your company. Keep the focus on what's interesting to your audience.
• Never forget to monitor your feedback and respond swiftly.
• Never overlook the importance of having a good hosting provider. You need a reliable server infrastructure that's equipped to handle traffic spikes.