CONTENT MARKETING
Content Marketing and Social Media
Social media and content marketing can work really well
together, especially for small business owners and entrepreneurs with limited
resources. Once you’ve created a piece of content that you’d like to use for
marketing and set up a functioning email list, you can use social media to look
for leads.
There are four social networking websites that all business
owners should be aware of. While you shouldn’t try to maintain a profile on all
of them, you need to know they exist. Here is a short description of each of
those websites as a refresher.
Facebook
This is currently the largest social networking website in
the world. It has been said to have over a billion users. In fact, some people
would say that the number of Facebook users makes it the size of a country. The
billion users are on the website for a variety of reasons but they’re largely
social. People use Facebook as a tool for keeping in touch with friends,
family, classmates, business associates and anyone else they want to connect
with.
Because there are so many people using Facebook, it’s very
valuable for businesses. There are about 15 million businesses using Facebook
as a marketing and community building tool. One of the reasons that number is
so high is because it’s free to have a Facebook account whether you’re a
business or an individual. Another reason that number is so high is because
being on Facebook gives you direct access to a lot of people in one central
place.
Not only does Facebook have a free option for reaching your
audience, it also has a paid service called Facebook Ads. This allows you to
run ads on Facebook targeting a very specific demographic. You can also do it
while working with any sized budget. You choose the keywords, audience and
region you want to target and set the budget then run your campaign.
You pay a set amount for each person that clicks on your
ad. Once your budget runs out, your ad stops running. Then you can go in and
review the statistics and see how effective your ad was at getting leads.
With these two different ways to engage and interact with
the Facebook community, it makes sense that about 15 million businesses would
have a presence on the website.
Twitter
This is one of the largest social networking websites with
a focus on micro blogging. Twitter users communicate through short 140
character posts.
There are about half a million users on Twitter and over
four million businesses on it. It’s free for a business to create a profile and
start using Twitter. Many businesses use
Twitter to communicate with their audience. Some of them use it to feature
giveaways and share special offers while others use it as a customer service
tool.
Twitter provides a lot of value to businesses because it
makes it possible for them to have conversations with their audience. It also
makes it possible for them to tune in to the conversations being had and gain
some insight into what people really want. Some brands have found very creative
ways to leverage their Twitter community and experience a lot of benefit from
it.
In addition to the free profile that every business can
create, Twitter has a new advertising feature. You can either promote your
specific Twitter account or promote specific tweets. It works two different
ways.
Promoted
Account
If you want to get more Twitter followers overall, you
would create a campaign to promote your account. You choose your budget and are
charged only when someone follows you. Once your budget is exhausted, your
campaign will stop running.
Promoted Tweets
If you want to highlight a specific tweet, you would create
a campaign to promote that tweet. You choose your budget and are charged when
someone interacts with your tweet in some way. This means that any time someone
retweets, favorites or replies to your tweet you will be charged. Once your
budget is exhausted, your tweet will stop being promoted.
Twitter is a very active community and the new advertising
option makes it very valuable for businesses to reach a large audience at once.
It’s even more valuable because you don’t pay until your tweet garners some
kind of interaction or response.
LinkedIn
With over 250 million users, LinkedIn is a social media
community with a strong business to business audience. It’s largely used by
companies as a recruiting tool and by people seeking job opportunities. The
format of the profile is like an interactive resume and the groups are all
centered on a type of professional development. People can only request
connections from others that they have some kind of relationship with or have
been referred to by someone else.
LinkedIn is the top business focused social media network.
It’s free for businesses to create a page as long as there is a personal
profile created by the person setting it up. There are different safeguards in
place to ensure that LinkedIn remains a valuable network for the business
community. LinkedIn has a focus on networking which is why users can’t randomly
send requests to anyone. It also has different communities set up for
individuals with similar professional interests can come together.
Those safeguards have worked pretty well so far which is
why there are about three million businesses using the network. You can rest
assured that the people following your business are doing it because they’re
interested in your company specifically.
As a business user, you can share information about your
company, including the website. You can also share company updates. In fact,
the best way to make your LinkedIn page valuable is to actively share updates
and information on a regular basis.
As with the other social networking websites, LinkedIn has
a feature that allows you to purchase sponsored updates. You choose your target
audience and how you’d like to pay and set your bid. Your post will be visible
to that audience until your budget is exhausted then your update will stop
being featured. The same goes for any ads you’d like to run.
You can run ads whether you have a business account or not
but if you want to establish your brand on LinkedIn, it’s best to create a
company page.
Pinterest
It started out as an online scrapbooking website but now
Pinterest is one of the largest social media communities. It has over 70
million users. Initially the audience on Pinterest was largely made up of women
who would share pictures of recipes, weddings, fashion and other women oriented
lifestyle images.
It has since exploded with a growing and broadening
audience and businesses began to see the benefit in joining the Pinterest
community. It’s free for business to join Pinterest and there isn’t an official
advertising feature just yet. Pinterest is experimenting with having promoted
pins but there’s no definitive program currently in place.
Using Pinterest gives you access to the community of 70
million users that enjoy interacting with images and videos. You can use
Pinterest’s visual focus to create an image that supports your brand.
Even though you can’t run ads on Pinterest, you can share
pins that link back to your website and encourage people to make a purchase.
Some businesses have experienced success with creating pin boards around a
specific type of product and encouraging users to click through to purchase
that product.
While these are four of the more popular social media
websites, it’s not necessary for you to create a profile for your business on
all of them. In fact, you should choose the one that works best for you and
focus on that one. It takes time to really take advantage of any social media
website even if you incorporate an advertising campaign into your use of it.
However, many business owners aren’t sure how to best
benefit from the use of social media. Here’s an example of how you can use
Facebook to build a community and sales leads.
Facebook for Sales Leads
You have to create a Facebook profile before you can do
anything business oriented on Facebook. Once your profile is set up with a
decent amount of information, you can create a Facebook Page for your business.
Put your personal picture on your page and include a description with a link to
your website. Now you’re ready to start using Facebook to build your business.
1. Invite
your personal friends to like your Facebook page.
This is why you should have an active account before you
set up a page. It helps to jump start your likes with your own personal
friends. By having your personal photo on the page, you increase the odds that
your friends will like your page out of support for you.
2. Jazz
up your page with your company logo and an interesting cover photo.
Find an interesting image to represent your company. This
should be your cover photo. Then change your main picture to your company logo.
Use a cover photo that incorporates you and your company logo. You want to find
a way to prominently feature your face so your friends will be more likely to
like the page. Make these changes after you’ve sent out the initial invites and
some of your friends have liked your page. By doing it this way, any updates
you make will show up in your feed and theirs giving you additional exposure.
3. Start
sharing posts on your page.
This is a great place to start sharing curated content.
Look for interesting articles, videos and pictures you can share with your new
community. Keep an eye out for ways to engage them wherever possible.
4. Create
an advertising campaign using Facebook Ads to get more likes to your page.
Get more likes for your page by doing a small budget
advertising campaign. Don’t spend more than $50 for the campaign. You shouldn’t
break the bank with this campaign. You just want to get a few more followers.
Plus this is a great way for you to familiarize yourself with the way Facebook
Ads works.
5. Continue
to engage your growing community using content.
You want to keep finding ways to engage with your audience.
Experiment with different forms of content and observe how your audience
interacts with it. This will give you some great insight into the types of
content that is most effective with your audience.
6. Create
a content marketing campaign.
Create a campaign where you
giveaway a piece of content in exchange for emails using an email marketing
service. Make sure you put the campaign on your website and look for ways to
promote it.
7. Create
an advertising campaign on Facebook to get more emails added to your list.
Once you’ve created the campaign and featured it
prominently on your website you should run an ad on Facebook. You can keep the
budget modest with the idea of running it a few times while you’re doing the
campaign.
8. Invite
members of your growing Facebook community to join your email list.
You can invite your Facebook community to join your email
list and get a free download of the piece of content you’ve created.
You have now officially launched and executed a Facebook
marketing campaign using content. If you keep engaging your growing audience
while running short, budget friendly advertising campaigns, you will experience
some measurable results. Yes you will have had to make some financial
investment but it won’t be expensive and you will have an active presence on
the largest social networking website in the world.
This is just an example of how you can use Facebook in
conjunction with your content marketing campaign to get more sales leads. It’s
fairly simplistic and if you take the time to map it out in advance, you can
hand it off to a qualified assistant so you can focus on other business
building activities.
It’s not hard to benefit from social media. All it takes is
an understanding of the outlet you want to use and a plan to make the most of
it. The plan is necessary to ensure that you are getting the most benefits out
of your social profile. It’s also necessary so you can use it again in the
future.
The great thing about social media business profiles is
that people expect a level of marketing when they join your community. As long
as you balance that marketing with engagement and look for ways to provide
value as often as possible, you’ll be able to really benefit from your use of
social media.
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