Social Media Marketing – Do’s and Don’ts

I have lots of friends on social media sites and it can be a great marketing tool when used correctly.  It allows you to brand yourself, to meet, network and build all kinds of relationships with like-minded people.

The most common error however is that many marketers constantly lead with a sales pitch of their opportunity.

On sites like Facebook, Twitter and others, people don’t really care about your business opportunity.  They care about themselves and what other people are up to.  So with that in mind, instead of pitching your business to people right out the gate, develop an interest in others.  People love to talk about themselves especially if someone else seems interested in them.

You can lead the conversation by asking questions about them on topics related to what you would ideally like to talk to them about.  For example, ask what they do for a living and this in turn may prompt a similar reciprocal question.  This is when you TALK about your business but don’t PITCH it, just have a conversation.

You can tell right away if you are talking with a potential prospect.  If they do seem interested, give them a link where they can learn more.  Ideally this should be your blog site or hub page and even better if it has a Bio page included.  This way, the visitor will really get a feel for who you are and what you have to offer.

It is OK to post an ad on your social media sites wall, but it is even better to provide value in your posts.  The more value you can add and the more interest you generate in your posts, the more people will pay attention to you and seek out your profile to learn more.

In your posts you can be as dramatic as you like, controversial even, funny or whatever it takes to get attention.  Never, ever be negative or attack someone, this is so not cool.

If you really don’t like someone’s posts, then it is very easy just to delete them from your friends’ list.  Personal attacks put you in a bad light and this can have negative consequences for you.

You can drive a more targeted social media list by starting a group connected to your business opportunity.  Start off by inviting all your friends to it, and then have them invite their friends also.  You must be prepared to bring value to the group however, but it is a forum for you to promote your opportunity.

So long as you continue to provide more value than pitch and people feel they come away from your posts with something to enrich their life, they will begin to promote you without the need for pitching.

In summary:

• Build relationships with your social media friends
• Don’t lead by pitching your business opportunity
• Don’t spend time on people who are not interested in you or your business
• Nurture relationships with people who are
• Don’t send people directly to your landing page
• Send them to a blog or hub page
• Don’t spam your friends or followers with ads
• Always provide valuable content
• Don’t be boring
• Do whatever it takes in your headlines to get people’s attention

A great site for learning all the technical know how’s on Facebook

Forum marketing – generate endless leads in a targeted marketplace

What is forum marketing?

Forum marketing a super simple strategy that almost anyone can use for networking, building relationships and building leads in this industry.  All over the internet there are a vast amount of interesting and free forums ranging from any niche you can imagine, from houses to animals to cars etc.  Network marketing, internet marketing, residual income, you name it, there are forums absolutely anywhere that you can network in.  Not only can you network in them, but you also get a signature file in a forum.  This is like a little ad that displays underneath every single post that you ever make in a forum.  This is one of the primary ways that you can generate traffic and leads from within forums.

A post (known as a thread) relates to something you write; anytime you think of a topic you want to write a short note about or you see topics displayed that you can add benefit to, then you are submitting a post.

Forum marketing is free, takes little effort and is lots of fun because you’re interacting, learning and building relationships.

Some recommended sites

Some forums I can recommend are:

• Richdad.com
• conqueryourniche.com
• warriorforum.com
• Betternetworker.com
• wahm.com (work at home mums)
• homebasedbusiness.com

The wahm.com forum, although by implication may be aimed at a specific audience, is not that at all, there are lots of different types of businesses on there and a variety of threads that you can add value to and promote your business opportunity.

For example, I went into warriorforum for the purposes of adding some value to this article and there are currently 689 people viewing the internet marketing forum threads in there.  What potential is that for you to promote your opportunity?

It’s not all about you and your opportunity though, and if that’s all you go into forums to do, people will get annoyed; you need to go in and add value.  This can be done by educating others, sharing experiences or simply starting a thread on a niche topic that is of interest to you and you wish to gauge the opinions of others.  The main point of all of these is about building relationships; remember people join people not businesses!

The main concept about online marketing and internet marketing is ‘What attracts people to you?’  It is the amount of value that you offer them, the depth of the relationship that you have with them.

How to position yourself when in the forums

This is how you want to position yourself when you’re in any social networking.  You want to promote the team training that you have to offer alongside the team infrastructure.  You want to position the fact that you are plugged into people or that you yourself can teach people how to make money.  It’s that simple – you can teach people how to be a true professional in this industry, how to understand the true marketing principles out there that allow people to generate leads or bring in new business and do all these different things and that you know how to teach that to anyone.  On top of that, you’ve got the whole training platform infrastructure in place so when you’re networking and building relationships and talking to other leaders, you can relate to the unnecessary duplication required because everything is already there.

So, what are you waiting for?  Get out there and start building new and productive relationships within the many forums connected to your niche, promote yourself as a leader in the industry, provide value to others and raise awareness of your opportunity in a targeted marketplace.

Is Facebook heading for world dominance?

I was just reading an article on the BBC website this morning that focussed on Facebook and how it has now grown to having a global audience of 300 million active users each month.

The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg stated that they had not expected to make a profit until 2010 but were way ahead of schedule with this.

The site is gathering about 5 million new users each week and this equates to 50 million in the last 75 days.  It is not hard to see therefore that this social networking site is definitely at the cutting edge of all others.  The site’s popularity was evident to me recently when I was on holiday in Europe.  The resort we stayed in hosted a bank of PCs, I think there were about 8 in total and they always had some young person sat in front of them.  I found it really interesting that every time I passed, each and every one of them were on their Facebook page.  I also noticed some older people also using Facebook and this is because it is an excellent way of building networks in the business world also.

Facebook is primarily funded through advertising and what I noticed and don’t think it’s a coincidence is that when I open up my Facebook home page, there are age appropriate adverts on there.  I’m not going to say what they are, but one could take offence with some of them if one didn’t feel as old as they were!

Companies who are not using Facebook to promote their products through direct advertising are missing a huge opportunity to get in the face of 300 million people each month.

Facebook Lite (no, not for those looking to save calories while using Facebook)

The recent launch of Facebook Lite has not gone unnoticed either and is probably partly attributable for the recent rapid growth in users.  Facebook Lite will be faster and simpler than the main site because it offers fewer services.  Initially it is designed to support users in developing countries where bandwidth constraints make the current version too slow to use.  At the moment it is only available in India and the US.  Many industry watchers said they believed that even users with good internet connections might well flock to Facebook Lite because of its new look and ease of use.

Twitter seems to be at the forefront of any discussion regarding social networking but I’m not convinced that it can ever match up to the popularity and profitability of Facebook.  If Facebook continues to expand its platform and incorporate some of the Twitter features, this could spell trouble for the Twitter industry.