Social Media Best Practices

Hello Divas! Are you ready to build up your online entourage? This month, we’re giving you great tips on how to do just that. We’re bringing you some guides on how to make social media marketing work as part of your Internet marketing strategy.

Social media helps you reach people you’ve never met nor would you encounter in your daily life. We’re going to show you how to convert those unknowns to followers, fans and ultimately customers. Are you ready to grow your entourage? Let’s start with a quick overview of what you’ll learn:

• Social Media Best Practices – We’re going to cover the best practices of social media marketing and how to select the right venues for building your entourage. Not all social markets will fit your business, so why waste your time?
• Your Social Media Agenda – You must have an agenda if you’re going to be successful in social media marketing. We’ll give you a guide for developing this agenda and how to measure it.
• Social Media Timesavers –How to actually find time for social media marketing in your busy day and how to make it consistent and effective.
• A Review of How Google+ Works – Google’s social network is all the rage, but it’s foreign to many of us Facebook fans. We’ll weigh the pros and cons of becoming engaged with this newer network.

Social Media Best Practices

Don’t jump into every tool too quickly. If you don’t understand a tool or how it will affect your business, don’t take the plunge too quickly. Spend a little time researching the tool. Watch some videos. Ask around about how others similar to you are using the tool. Look at who is participating in the tool. Are they the people you want as customers?

Learn how to use tools the right way. One of the easiest ways to lose fans and followers is to mishandle your social media tools. Posting too often on Facebook. Being too sales pitch oriented on Twitter. Linking your Twitter feed to your LinkedIn activity updates. These are just a few ways you can annoy your fans, followers and connections. Here’s a quick cheat sheet on how to use the big three:

Facebook –

• Don’t post more than three times a day.
• Post interesting content. Automate your blog updates (we’ll talk more about this in a minute.)
• Ask questions.
• Don’t use the discussion board. Keep the conversations on your Wall.
• Check for Spam and unruly fans a couple times a day.
• Clean up your wall once a week.
• Use apps sparingly. The beauty of Facebook is how personal it is. Get too app happy and you could lose this.
• Post around noon every day and post on Saturday. These are the best times to get response.

Twitter –

• Post often. Twitter is hard to manage, but if you sit down once a week or day and automate five Tweets per day, it can be simpler.
• Schedule time to be on duty. You will want to participate in Twitter in real time.
• Set up keyword alerts for Twitter. Hootsuite and TweetDeck allow you to do this as well as automate posts.
• Try to link as much as possible. Linking from Twitter will drive traffic, but it also gives your followers an action item.
• ReTweet valuable content. Want to build a following? Find others who produce great content of interest to your audience. Use the Retweet to spread the message and always thank others for the RT.
• Respond to @ replies. This is a great way to generate followers and conversations. If someone asks you a question, answer them. If someone mentions you, thank them.
• Don’t automatically follow everyone back at first. Look at the people who follow you and then send them a personal direct message.
• Use hash tags. Hash tags are the #topic you see on Twitter all the time. Use them like keywords and take advantage of trending topics when you can.

LinkedIn

• Don’t link up your Twitter feed with LinkedIn. You will annoy your connections and get blocked for view.
• Don’t try to connect to people you’ve never met. Always ask for an introduction or tell an unknown why you want to connect.
• Don’t send blanket messages to your connections. Use personal, short messages without a sales pitch to share content or ask questions.
• Ask for recommendations. Recommendations give you street cred on LinkedIn. Ask people you’ve done business with for a rec.
• Join a few groups. Joining some groups on LinkedIn can expand your customer base and industry peeps. Be sure you can participate in the group before you join. And participate in the discussions at least once a week.
• Answer and ask questions. LinkedIn Answers can be a treasure trove of prospects if you deliver value to questions where you have expertise. Don’t answer just for the sake of answering. You’ll get reamed.
• View who’s looked at your profile, but don’t send a message. This can be creepy. Give them a peek back, but don’t send a message that says, “I saw that you viewed my profile…want to buy something?”

Use Google Alerts to fuel your social media marketing. Google Alerts is a great place to gather information for blog ideas and your social media marketing posts. Set alerts for your top keywords and competitors. You can have them emailed to you or view them in your RSS feed reader (highly recommend this approach). Spend a few minutes each day looking at these alerts to see if you can craft a blog response or share something of value in the moment.

This is the quick and dirty guide to social media best practices, but if you follow these guidelines, you can build a strong following and generate traffic and customers. Social media marketing is a key piece of your marketing arsenal. Just don’t let your weapons shoot you in the foot.

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Tags: Facebook, Featured, linkedin, social media, social media etiquette, twitter