Business Coaching

Social media marketing is how many companies market campaigns today.

Regardless of whether you read BusinessCoaching.com regularly or not, unless you’ve been under a rock this last year, you should know that social media marketing efforts have increased — and have reaped great rewards. Track how many sales or clients you get from Twitter, APP, drive traffic to your website and ultimately, market yourself via the Internet and social media sites. Social media marketing is a great business coaching resource.

But if you’re still overwhelmed by how to market your company with all the sites and strategies out there, hopefully these five tips will help make it a bit clearer. You don’t have to use all the sites out there to market yourself.

1) Thoroughly explore your options: You don’t have to join the big sites like Facebook and Twitter to have an effective social media marketing campaign. There are several smaller, lesser-known sites that cater to specific niche audiences. For a list of these sites, click here.

2) Tailor your efforts to each site: It’s important to remember, especially if you’re marketing via niche sites, to interact with users in a manner they’ll relate to. Customize your message to every different audience you’re contacting so you’re “speaking their language.”

3) Track your efforts: It’s easier to do than it sounds. Incorporate shortened URLs when you campaign on each site. TinyURL, bit.ly and owl.ly are great free services that allow you to shorten a normal URL (key for Twitter, where you can only post 140 characters at a time), making it easier to share links, encourage others to spread the word, and make it easy to track your efforts, providing in-depth stats like where users who clicked the link are located and how many times each link was clicked. Then all that’s left to do is see what’s working, what’s not, and alter your campaign as needed.

4) Keep it real: No one likes spammers, shameless self-promotion or trained parrots. Don’t keep repeating the same things over and over again, or you won’t sound genuine at all…more like a repetitive ad. Also take into consideration that usually if you’re a big brand, you’ll be targeted more harshly. So be careful, but also be honest, be real, be interesting, and don’t insult people’s intelligence. The easiest way to do this is to touch on hot topics in the news, or newsworthy stories and issues that relate to your business and industry. These will attract attention, start conversations and will eventually relate to your message and draw even more attention to your campaign.