Do you find yourself being sucked into the Social Media Vortex?

Do you worry that you are not maximizing your Social Media Marketing ROI?

Many people find that as they add online social networking to their business activities, efficiency and time management become  more and more challenging.

Although social media is free for the most part, it is not necessarily true that using it for marketing purposes is going to be free. It can be a huge time hog and add more cost to your business than you realize.

We all know it’s about relationships. We know that marketing online increases our exposure and creates a new warm market.

But if you are new to social media it might seem quite like you’ve gone down the rabbit hole, into a wonderland of new experiences, people, relationships and business opportunities. Entertainment begins to wind its way into your business activities.

You might begin to feel overwhelmed to the point of distraction, following every interesting Tweet and blog you find, until your distraction outweighs your productivity.

As it has been said, the best thing about working for yourself is that you have no one to tell you what to do. But the worst thing about working for yourself is that you have no one to tell you what to do.

Here are some tips and reminders for you if you feel yourself sliding down that slippery slope:

Limit Your Marketing Efforts to Your Target Market

Once you have determined what your what your target market is, join the social networks where you are most likely to connect with these people, and join groups or participate in forum discussions providing value over promotion.

Keep it Simple

Start with just one to three social networks, and stay away from the likes of Facebook applications and games, they are time wasters and can be addictive.

Budget your time in Twitterville, YouTube, or social bookmarking sites, as these can be an enticing vortex. While it is very tempting to look at a dozen links, videos and pages, the next thing you know an hour or two is lost (although you may find an occasional nugget to use to add value for an upcoming post or video).

It is cordial to respond to messages, write messages for friend requests and check out content that your friends send you, but this quickly becomes burdensome. Learn to prioritize your response messaging according to contacts you have qualified as being in your most targeted market. Limit the links that you follow to those from people you have built a relationship with first. These can be distracting and even hazardous!

Use Tools that Increase Productivity

Do use social bookmarking sites such as Stumble.com, Digg.com, and Del.icio.us to increase your exposure and SEO.Just be careful of surfing the always interesting content there, and if you do make sure it’s something that feeds into your ideas for your own content.

Make tagging your blog to these sites easy using clickable buttons (plugins often provide these).

Learn about and use account management application sites such as Socialoomph.com (previously TweetLater.com), FriendFeed.com, and Ping.fm to consolidate your postings.

Twitter and Facebook can be set to post directly to FriendFeed, but I found that I didn’t want Twitter updates to post to Facebook since due to a much larger number of followers on Twitter, I create more updates on my Twitter account.

It seemed it would be a nuisance on the slower paced Facebook to have my Twitter updates post there. The last thing I want to do is annoy my target market audience!

And as a side note, since Socialoomph.com no longer posts directly to Twitter for scheduled updates, you can post to ping.fm and have it’s updates posted to Twitter. There are also software tools that you can run locally on your computer for this purpose, but I’ve not yet tried any.

And if you want to pump up your visibility, take your online presence to the next level with the Unified Tribe, a social networking community platform designed to take your content viral and get you noticed in ever widening circles. It is a true time saver when it comes to doing social media marketing on a mass scale.

Listen

Remember you are in a relationship business first and foremost! And that means your primary focus should be on your prospects, your potential customers or business partners.

Don’t be a ‘false networker’ or just accumulate friends for the sake of gaining numbers.

Your most important skill when face to face, listening, carries into the realm of social media. Learn about your contacts, and find out what it is that they need.

Spend just a few minutes a day perusing the updates of your contacts to learn their current interests and needs. They also may be posting content that you’d like to incorporate into your own, so bookmark sites that you’ll want to return to later.

Learn the Art of Communication

If your communication skills are lacking in the area of writing, or ad copy, work on that at least to the extent that you can be interesting, concise, and keep your readers interested.

Writing is not an impossible skill for someone even if they are currently poor at writing. I’ve even seen someone not use correct grammar and spelling and yet write an enjoyable and compelling post! As long as you are enthusiastic, educational and/or entertaining, you’ll have an audience.  And with practice you’ll be more proficient.

Writing a catchy headline is even more important than interesting content in a post. Headlines should grab attention and the post should be interesting enough but not overly wordy or disjoint.

A great little tool is the marketing headline analyzer – it will rate your headlines for readers’ appeal – http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm

Learn how to compose yourself and what to say to people when the opportunity does arise to mention your product, service or business opportunity. You don’t want to have them running in the opposite direction from what they perceive as another attempt to “sell” them. And if you are at all negative, unaccommodating, or desperate, you’ll quickly turn them off.

Just be yourself and let people get to know, like and trust you you while you get to know them and understand their needs, and if you master your social media marketing schedule, and you can’t go wrong!

Wishing You Awesome Success!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 2:31 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.