posted 05/19/10 | Enterprise University
By Ed Mayuga, Principal, AMM Communications LLC
In my Enterprise University class, “DIY Marketing – How to Promote Your Business through Social Media,” we discuss how a person can build his/her personal brand and enhance the brand of his/her company. Brand-building is synonymous with marketing, and marketing is the ability to convince potential customers to know, like, and trust you. Social media facilitates this trust building, because it allows you to have a direct conversation with people in your network, without any intermediate steps along the way.
Important things to remember when having a conversation via social media:
1. Increase profits by driving people to your website, which can be set up to capture important lead information, such as name, phone number, and e-mail address, for your business developers to follow up on.
2. Share your knowledge with your network, by blogging or forwarding website links that you think would be of interest to your network.
3. Build expertise and gather testimonials from the satisfied customers that follow you; the advantage to this is that those positive comments can be seen by your entire network.
4. Increase the number of pages indexed by the popular search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, by producing content associated with you. Monitor these mentions by using Google Updates.
5. Social media is not an ongoing sales pitch for your product or service!
Driving traffic to your website is the number one reason to engage in Social Media Marketing. Your website should be optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so that potential customers can find you. If you want to set up your own domain (such as www.yourname.com), you can use this website to consolidate all of your social media feeds - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn – and make it easy for additional people to connect with you and build your network. By the way, even if you don’t intend to be an active Twitter user, you should sign up with a unique “handle” so that no one else can take it before you and secure your place on this network.
One objection I often hear is people’s perceptions that there is not enough time to manage all of the social media feeds. Fortunately, there are multiple free tools available on the web to facilitate social network management. I recommend Hootsuite for multiple feeds (www.hootsuite.com) and TwInbox (www.twinbox.com) for Microsoft Outlook users to monitor Twitter feeds. By utilizing these tools and committing only 10-15 minutes each morning to monitoring your networks, you can easily manage your social media time without getting overwhelmed.
Finally, many people are concerned with return on investment for the time spent on social networking and marketing. Two free tools are Google Alerts and Google Analytics. These are easy to use, and there is a tremendous amount of tutorial information available by searching on YouTube or another search engine, for “how to” or “DIY” tips. Google Alerts is excellent for tracking how often your name shows up, and people are often surprised where they are mentioned; these alerts can be sent automatically to your inbox. Google Analytics is also a great tool for tracking how often, how long, and from where the website traffic to your site originates.
Social media marketing can seem like a daunting task; however, if you start small and build your network slowly and consistently, you will begin to see gains in a short amount of time!
Ed Mayuga, a principal at AMM Communications LLC, the St. Louis-based public relations consulting firm, provides business management consulting in the areas of public relations, marketing, crisis communication, social media and business development training. Founded in 2008, AMM Communications is a public relations consultancy for small and mid-sized financial institutions, professional service firms, and manufacturing companies nationwide. Ed can be contacted at 314.485.9810 or .