What has always been the simplest way to generate new business? Referrals from existing customers to their friends and families.
Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive and most productive form of advertising. Most people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only one 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a positive return on investment. No one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers will make a purchasing decision using the input of family and friends.
Social media marketing provides the electronic platform for word of mouth marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The common Facebook user has 130 friends and is linked to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets go out every week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more prevalent today through social media marketing than any other amount of time in the history of business. Can your organization afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?
If Luxury Travel Experiences are like me, you study from making mistakes. However, when you can study from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. Why not learn from the mistakes of others? Below are a few common mistakes new marketers make when attempting to create and implement a social media plan:
I’ll figure it out as I go- the largest time waster is going right into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take time to get educated on social media sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very time consuming and will lead to many companies abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the fundamentals of setting up these site, understand the different options, and spend your time engaging instead of fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs on the market that are designed to teach business owners on how to create and implement a social media marketing plan.
Let’s add 100 sites in one day- it’s tempting to go out and create a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at one time. But the problem with this particular strategy is that should you grow too fast, you will not be able to keep up with all the benefits of each site. The best approach is to create one site, like Facebook, learn the facts and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and engage with others. If you start up 12 at once, you will not be as active as well as your lack of participation could defeat your current goal. It’s easier to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social media sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.
Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with people who don’t have complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, lots of people will find you before they find your website. If they find your website and you have a pic of your logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most importantly, be personable.
Here’s the pitch- here’s the largest stumbling block for most beginning marketers. After they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This type of media is a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try this on social media. Traditional one way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and trying to imitate these ineffective methods on a fresh medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Rather than selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself as an expert in the field where you are practicing. For example, if you are an agent, instead of promoting yourself and your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to market a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you’ll become an expert on the subject. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell his / her house, they will most likely ask for your services.
Same approach to communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people like to read, others like video, and some people will be drawn to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up how you post. If you simply put out a blog each day, your followers will become blind to your communication method. Change it up a little. In case you have a blog one day, then put up a simple video another. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you’ll achieve.
Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media activity. This doesn’t mean that you must make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal would be to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, you’ll find it’s better to have 1 post per day than 3 days with 10 posts.
Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I would use to talk to people. Having to log into multiple accounts every day to check on the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The truth is, it became to frustrating to do this and I hardly ever used my email. However, once I learned to load all of my email accounts into Outlook, I could efficiently check and utilize the benefits of email. The same applies to social media. When you have to log into and log from 5 different social media marketing sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your level of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that may enable you to log into your entire social media makes up about interactions may be the easiest way to ensure that you consistently implement your social media marketing plan. Again, there are several good all-in-one social media dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social media efforts.
In summary, if you’re a small business owner looking to create a social media plan for your business, then you absolutely should educate yourself on how to utilize the technology and find tools to assist you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to build a house and you don’t possess a hammer, that house isn’t going to get built. By taking the steps listed above in this article, it is possible to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media plan.
