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.

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Infographic: The Blogging Food Groups & Do You Serve Well-Balanced Content Meals?

Everyone loves desserts, but you’ve also got to eat your vegetables to be healthy. Does the same hold true with blogging? That a “healthy” blog won’t just be all funny videos and meme images but also contain a balance of others and more substantial content? If so, then knowing your “blogging food groups” may help.

Created by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, the infographic below builds on an idea from Rick Burnes of HubSpot, that there are five types of posts to “feed” a business blog. The LinkedIn infographic suggests a “Blogging Meal Plan” after defining the groups more as well as a suggested time to spend on each type:

How can I be number one in the rankings-SEO Experts

Have you ever had a client ask, “How can I be number one in the rankings?” Here’s the answer:

Social Media 101: Social Media Marketing: Six Fundamentals

1. What Your Customers Say About You Matters

Let’s face it. We live in a world full of advertisements and we just don’t trust what brands say about themselves.
However, we do trust what our friends say.
That is why so many people are willing to try something new based on what their friends say on social media.
Some call this word-of-mouth, some call it peer-to-peer recommendations. No matter what you call it, getting people to recommend you
can go a long way to driving both new and repeat business.

82% of small businesses say word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to market their business and find new customers.
Source: American Express Open and SEMPO, “Small Business Search Marketing Survey” March 23, 2011

2. Online Recommendations Translate into Purchases

Good or bad, people are influenced by their friends. So friend recommendations have a significant impact on purchasing decisions.
How big is that impact? According to a MarketingProfs survey, 73% of the U.S. participants had learned about a product online and 51%
had purchased a product based on an online recommendation.

3. You Must Provide a Great Customer Experience

Social media provides every person with a stage to share their thoughts and opinions with friends and other consumers.
If you provide them with a great customer experience, social media will reward you with positive reviews and endorsements that
attract new business.
If a customer has a less than perfect experience, social media will let you know. But that’s not such a bad thing so long as you
take the opportunity to respond to them and use that feedback constructively to improve the way you serve your customers.
Bottom line: There’s no marketing cure for providing a poor customer experience.
“Rarely can you sprinkle magical branding dust to create an endearing and enduring brand from scratch.”
Marketing Strategist John Moore

4. Permission is Key

In a world full of interruptive marketing noise, permission-based marketing is a powerful tool for fighting through the clutter.
Simply put, by obtaining consent from your customers and prospects to contact them with marketing messages they are more likely to
respond to your offers, more likely to share with their friends, and less likely to ignore you or consider your messages spam.
Permission comes in many forms:
Opt-in with an email address
Facebook “Like”
Twitter Follow
LinkedIn Connection
Attendance at an Event
That permission is part of what makes both email and social media marketing so powerful.

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually
want to get them. It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is
the best way to earn their attention.
Best selling author and marketing strategist, Seth Godin
Permission is Good for Business
People who like a brand on Facebook, follow a brand on Twitter or subscribe to a brand’s email newsletter, are more likely to buy and
recommend.

5. You Must Listen and Respond

To be a good conversationalist, you need to be a great listener.
Social media marketing is more about listening and responding than it is about broadcasting a message.
It’s critical that you monitor what people are saying to you and about you, your industry, your areas of expertise and your competitors.
(Don’t worry, we’ll show you how easy it is to monitor the online conversations.)
You’ve also got to be responsive—whether it’s to respond directly to a customer’s question or suggestion or join a discussion where you
can share your knowledge.
Remember: To build relationships you don’t need to speak “social media,” you just need to be yourself. Talk on social media the same
way you do in real life.
[Social Media] is not a one-way broadcast channel. We are no longer broadcasters. We are not part of the community we wish to
inform, and therefore we must establish prominence and earn influence in order to amass attention, instill enthusiasm, empower
ambassadors, and create a community of loyal collaborators toward a more meaningful form of unmarketing and communications.
Social media expert and author of Engage, Brian Solis

6. Social Media Marketing is a Commitment

Don’t worry, you don’t have to put a ring on it, but just like in real life, it takes time and effort to build relationships. And unfortunately,
sometimes that effort doesn’t generate immediate results.
With social media marketing, you need to be consistent and patient. Those relationships you build will pay off over time through
increased customer loyalty and advocacy.
To be an effective social media marketer you need to:
Invest time in both talking and listening (Even just 10-20 minutes/day)
Have a plan for creating engaging content
Find the right tools that will help you save time (We can help you with that!)

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.