A Beginner’s Social Media Marketing Plan

[gafimiv406]

If you haven’t started marketing your business on social media just yet, 2013 is your year to jump on board! We’ve created this beginners social media plan to help you hit the ground running. Let’s get started:

1. Create and Secure a Business Page/Username – Setting up a business page and username on the following “big four” social networks is crucial if you want people to easily find you:

Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Facebook
2. Start a Blog – Aside from obviously having presence on various social media sites, creating a blog also gives people the opportunity to learn more about, and interact with your company. Blogs are easy to create, can be quickly updated, and provide you with even more content to share on your social networks. Check out our post, Blog Wars: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr – Which Platform Rules? to find the best blogging platform for you and your business.

3. Listen & Connect – After you’ve set up your social networks, it’s time to “listen” to social conversations and build relationships. You can search for social conversations in the following places:

Twitter Search – This is a great place to start your relationship with the Twitter community. You can type in a keyword, phrase or use a hashtag (#) in front of a word to find people who’re talking about subject matter that relates to your business.
Facebook Search – Facebook search plays a second fiddle to Twitter search, but you can still find some great information in public posts.
Pinterest – You can search thousands and thousands of pin boards for interesting content and find people who share your interests both personally and professionally.
It’s a good idea to find several contacts on the various social networks to build relationships with. Don’t feel like you have to converse right away. You can just follow for a while and see what’s being talked about. But, if you have something to add to the conversation, do it.

4. Share Content

Content plays a huge role in not only building an audience, but keeping one as well. Some of nepal whatsapp number database the content you can share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest includes:

Your own blog posts
Customer testimonials
FAQs
Links to other interesting blog posts (provide attribution and proper source credit)
Photos
Live and recorded webinars
Product and service updates
eBooks
Handbooks
Quotes
Questions
Videos (YouTube is a great place to start)
Industry articles
5. Stick with It

We all start social media marketing plans with the best intentions, but remember social media takes time and consistency to prove its worth. Results won’t happen overnight. Some ideas to sustain your social media marketing plan include:

Respond to a least one social action daily. Whether you retweet a link, like or comment on a post or repin a picture, keeping your business in front of your audience is key to staying top of mind.
Don’t give up after a week, or two or even three. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your social media marketing plan. The social programs that have been successful over the last several years are ones that remain consistent.
6. Measure