Social media marketing is quickly growing in popularity for promoting many products, services and opportunities.

But it is often abused by overzealous marketers, especially by newbies who thwart their own efforts unknowingly.

These guidelines, as expressed by most experts across the internet marketing industry (though not necessarily in this order or format) are highly recommended if you do not want to waste your efforts.

Following these rules will ensure that you get the best return on investment from your social networking efforts, assuming that you already have a strategy and a plan of action.  For a more step-by-step description of how you should get things started, see “Getting Started Properly in Social Media Marketing“.

Once you know your target market, your purpose, goal and strategy, your plan of action should follow these general guidelines to make the most of your marketing efforts:

1 – Never Spam! Please do not abuse new friends and contacts with a pitch or your product or opportunity (if you realized how many people here every single day, does it seem reasonable that your pitch would somehow stand out?).

And it is particularly presumptuous and unprofessional to post your product ads or business opportunities on someone’s social networking profile. This is akin to walking into their house without invitation while they are having a cocktail with their family or friends, or perhaps even their own business associates, and launching into a pitch! This makes you stand out as an amateur. And it will get you ignored, un-followed, or worse, blocked.

2 – Personalize your profile – If you want to grow your network of followers with whom you will build trust, do not turn your profile into a billboard for your biz-opp and/or product. You should instead be yourself and personalize your profile with a few things that let people get to know you.

3 – Build Relationships – Use social networks to increase your reach, and get to know people through casual personal contact. If you truly plan on long term business relationships, you must allow these relationships to grow naturally.

Relationships come first in social media as a given, business second! You may have heard the adage that you must build ‘know, like and trust’. Well, this is how you build the ‘know’ part.

4 – Provide Value – To build the ‘like’ part of ‘know, like and trust’, you must provide some kind of value, whether it be educational, entertaining, or enlightening. Even if it is from another source, just give credit to that source! The trust will follow when you provide value with consistency, visibility, and honesty.

5 – Join groups which are part of your target market

6 – Make contacts / friends with people in those groups.

7 – Contribute value to those groups, DO NOT Spam

8 – Make comments on members’ posts to the group(s), vote and promote their content Follow up and thank everyone who  comments on your posts, or promotes / helps syndicate your content!

9 – Stay Visible! – Be persistently consistent with your presence and your message.

10 – Post your content from your various postings into your blog, increasing its SEO by updates, and post links back to your blog posts as an alternative to posting the entire content in a forum discussion. If your article has value then provide links to the content within your social media so that it may be syndicated.

For a more in-depth discussion on implementing a plan for realizing the benefits of social media marketing see “Are You Creating Your Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine“.

If you have any questions or want help getting your social media marketing campaign going, feel free to contact me!

Wishing You Tremendous Success!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 11:10 PM and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.