10 Laws of Social Media Marketing

1.       The Law of Listening –Success with social media and content marketing required more listening and less read your target audience’s online content and join discussion to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add values rather than clutter to their lives.

2.       The Law of Focus –It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3.       The Law of Quality –Quality trumps quality. It’s better to have 1000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4.       The Law of Patience –Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lighting in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5.       The Law of Compounding –If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more. This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points for search engines like thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6.       The Law of Influence –Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in you products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

7.       The Law of Value-If you spend all your time on the social Web directly prompting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversations and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In times, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

8.       The Law of Acknowledgment –You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9.       The Law of Accessibility –Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Following online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replay you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10.   The Law of Reciprocity –You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same foe them. So a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content publishing by others.

Social Media 101: Traditional vs. Social Media Marketing

There’s little doubt that technology has changed our lives, the way we are influenced and how we influence others. But for marketing,
it’s more than just doing the same old thing using new tools. Social media marketing isn’t your grandmother’s marketing—it’s different
from what most of us have traditionally learned about marketing.
Here’s what you need to know…

Traditional Marketing 101

Most everyone thinks of marketing as the business of promoting and selling products or services.

Marketers commonly refer to a “funnel” to describe the way they attract new prospects and convert them into customers.

What Do We Mean By Funnel?

Traditionally, we’ve prioritized our limited resources and time on trying to find and convert new prospects (the top of the funnel).

Keeping those hard-earned customers (the bottom of the funnel) has often been an afterthought.

That’s because, until recently, there was little we could do to keep existing customers that was drastically different from the tactics used to attract new ones.  

                                                    

Historically, the best you could do after turning a prospect into a customer was to provide a great customer experience and just hope they come back to buy more—and bring their friends with them.

But technology, namely social media and email, has changed the game.

Social Media Marketing — Flip that Funnel

   

And technology now enables us to influence consumer behavior both before and after the sale.

With low-cost and easy-to-use tools like social media and email, you no longer have to hope that customers come back and bring their friends with them.  

Now you can reach out to your existing customers to remind them to come back, and make word-of-mouth as easy as clicking the share, like, or tweet buttons.

Bottom line: successful businesses understand that marketing does not end with the sale, but rather it begins after the first sale (the bottom of the traditional sales funnel).

Social Media is an Important Part of  Your Marketing Mix, but Not the Only One.

Social media marketing is not a replacement for other marketing tactics and we highly recommend that you continue to do what has worked for you in the past.Traditional marketing activities that still work for you, like advertising in a newspaper, sending direct mail and attending networking events, are still essential.However, for most, social media marketing is now a critical component of an effective marketing strategy.In fact, social media marketing works best when combined with other marketing activities, especially email marketing.