What I have experienced in business is that having a detailed marketing plan is key to making your business model work for you. So, is social media marketing any different? NO….of course not.
1. Start a Twitter Account under your business or brand name.
Really simple, go to Twitter and just walk through the steps. Once you have your Twitter page up, make sure to customize it immediately. Fill out the complete profile and add all the important info that you want people to know about you. You will see a generic profile picture that Twitter generated for you (usually an egg). Next, go to settings and upload a company logo or a picture of yourself, depending on how you want your future and current clients to see you and your brand. Next, you can go to the design section and upload a custom background, again representing you and your brand. For my main Twitter account, I have chosen a very simple, colourful and very clean looking text.
2. Start a personal Facebook account and then start a Facebook Fan Page.
Because Facebook now has over 500 million users, it is a really a serious consideration to start learning how to use social media to attract your niche market. Facebook is also very easy to set up and fun to use. Make sure to become the default administrator by setting up your Fan Page through your personal account, which also may be important down the road as some of the administrative settings may change. When starting Facebook marketing, consider that the privacy settings can be tricky, so the way I look at it is if I don’t want the whole world to see something about my life or my business, for whatever reason I just don’t post it. The best censor is you, and that’s important especially knowing that much of what you are typing into Google, Twitter, and Facebook is being indexed, and depending on your Google setting, relevant results from people in your social networks will be brought up automatically when you do a regular Google search. This is a good thing. This is in Beta, but I see this as being very relevant information now and in the future.
3. Start learning how to blog or hire someone to help you with this.
One of my favorite buzz words right now is “REAL TIME”. If you and your brand have no presence in real time, you may see your Google rankings slipping day by day. Google now realizes that when people are searching for information they want the results that are the most current. So if you had a kick ass website with lots of pages and hits in the past, you can leverage that by building in a blog or switching to an awesome CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, which can do a great job at both. Having a stellar website might be very important for your business, but your blog is one of the best ways to introduce them to your brand message, a message that gets refreshed frequently by way of your blog.
Well, they sure are “easy”. You can “start today”, but are you really going to get any results by just doing some random stuff?
About #2 – in my opinnion you set up the page without being logged in. Facebook asks if you want to create a “virtual account” to be the main admin of the page. This account is only used to administer the page and can't be seen on the site.
Why this? Because the page is always tied to the first admin account. You simply can't remove this connection. If you happen to leave the organization, they may want the Facebook page back from you. You can hand the password to the “virtual account” and everyone's happy.
Awesome Sean!
Totally agree with and think this is fundamental: “having a detailed marketing plan in any business is key to making your business model work for you.”
Any social media efforts / engagements without the fundamentals in place are … well try it and find out!
Thank You for sharing Sean.