Part 3 - Social Marketing Strategy

STEP THREE OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

In order to benefit from social networking sites, you will need to find out where your niche audience socializes online. For example, if you are selling musical instruments, you’ll want to find communities of musicians, including niche social networking sites, forums and blogs that are on the topic and allow you to leave comments.

Niche social networking sites have more deeply involved members and better content than a general interest networking site, like Facebook or Myspace. The people you meet and develop relationships with on niche networking sites will be more targeted contacts, and this is exactly what you want as opposed to just contacting large volumes of people who may or may not be interested in anything you have to offer.

STEP FOUR OF YOUR SOCIAL  MARKETING STRATEGY

Join the social networking sites, create your profiles, and interact with others. Don’t think of this as marketing – instead, just mingle and participate in online conversations. In fact, you will gain the best results if you focus on building genuine friendships and sharing interests than you will if you attempt to use marketing tactics. Give, listen and help other people to connect with people who share interests or have something valuable to another person.

You will gain the best results if you set aside at least an hour at a time to work on your relationship building via social networking sites, several times per week. Use social networking sites to generously link to, promote and trade content with other people within your niche, and build traffic to all the pages of your sites that contain links to your web properties.

STEP FIVE OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

After a few weeks of participating actively in social networking sites, you can step back and analyse where the majority of your traffic and profits are coming from. Once you have pinpointed what is giving you the best results, you can focus your time and effort into those areas ongoing.

Part 4 of Social Marketing Strategy coming soon