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March 08, 2013

Five Social Media Marketing Strategies that Aren't Facebook

Many marketers seem to spend most of their time focusing on Facebook (News - Alert). With hundreds of millions of users, Facebook can be a very beneficial marketing platform, but other (very) powerful social media marketing platforms often go neglected, despite their ability to produce massive results.



Let’s take a quick look at what other angles you should be considering. 

Twitter (News - Alert)

Major corporations and savvy marketers utilize the power of Twitter to brand their business and increase sales. Traffic is king in marketing. The key to properly utilizing Twitter for your marketing needs is gathering as many targeted “Followers” as possible. Any “Follower” is a potential customer. Do not use auto-following scripts because these are usually bots. Instead, you want to “Follow” the right people in your niche who will potentially buy what you sell. They in turn will generally follow you as well.

You should not come across as overtly promotional. Rather, you need to post helpful unique content and repost anything you find interesting and valuable. To take advantage of your growing following, you need to include a link in your business profile back to your external site.

LinkedIn (News - Alert)

LinkedIn is the world’s largest audience of wealthy professionals. The site’s 65 million users have an average annual salary of over $109,000.00. This makes LinkedIn the absolute best social media platform for marketing. Unfortunately, it is widely overlooked by marketers who spend hours of their time on Facebook campaigns. In order to be a successful LinkedIn marketer, you must first create a quality business profile with links back to your main site. You also need to post regular status updates, join and actively participate in groups related to your niche, send non-“spammy” messages and invitations to those in your network and groups, and provide answers to questions posed in the “Answers” section.

Reaching out and making valuable contacts could increase your business, and may even help you find a job in the future! These actions will lead to your consideration as expert in your business or niche.

Pinterest

The latest Internet marketing craze of the past year is Pinterest. This social site gets millions of daily visits and has a predominantly older female demographic. These Pinterest users mainly visit the site looking for recipes, crafts, home décor tips, etc. Thus, in order to fully utilize the site for marketing purposes, you should have a product or business that would be of interest to this target audience. Successful Pinterest marketers follow and get followed by the heavy-hitters that attract a large following. They then create pinboards customized to a particular product.

It’s important to give helpful tips and not seem too promotional.

Google (News - Alert)+

Utilizing Google+ can give your business a definite competitive edge. The network has over 250 million users that you can market to, and it can also positively affect your rankings

To fully unleash the power of Google+, you need to:

  • Engage in conversations by combining your business and personal pages together
  • Put relevant keywords and links in your “About” page back to your website
  • Use Hangouts to connect with your customers and “Events” to build excitement
  • Utilize the power of video tutorials and testimonials on your business pages
  • Setup your business for the Google Authorship program

StumbleUpon (News - Alert)

This largely underutilized site has over 11 million users ready to get tapped into. It can be used to generate more traffic and sales than both Facebook and Twitter. The secret to success with StumbleUpon starts with stumbling and giving other people’s content a thumbs-up. The more you thumb up content in a specific niche (your niche), the more people will follow your content when you contribute it to the network.

You can also start an advertising campaign on StumbleUpon, leading to a blog post that provides useful information and pre-sells your product.




Edited by Braden Becker
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