Social Networking Etiquette: Mind Your Manners to Grow Your Business

Social media marketing is hotter than a firecracker, and growing hotter every day as online entrepreneurs realize just how effective this particular marketing technique can be.  If you aren’t using social media marketing—you should be. 

However, a word of caution: Use social media wisely or you can end up doing more harm to your business than good.  There are certain, basic, unwritten rules of etiquette that apply to social media.  Before diving into the deep end of the social media scene, familiarize yourself with these rules of etiquette so that you don’t jump in there and start putting your foot in it. 

There is a lot more to social media marketing than joining Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin and trying to get friends or followers.  First of all, don’t rush in and start requesting friends like somebody that’s been stranded on a desert island alone for the past 10 years and is desperate now for companionship of any sort.

Take your time. Go slowly. You’re impatient, that’s understandable. You have probably looked around and seen some of your competitors with 3000 friends and/or followers and you want to catch up.  But, quality is actually much more important than quantity, anyway. 

Think of your social community friends sort of like traffic to your online store. You want traffic, of course. But you want the right kind of traffic, not just a torrent of visitors who are not ever going to become buyers.  This applies to your social media friends, too. Be a bit selective about who your friends and followers are and aim for quality. 

A big No-No is to go through your online address book and send friend requests to everybody on it. You will not win friends this way. In fact, you will antagonize many of those people to the point where it will damage any existing relationship you have with them. 

The correct way to go about letting folks know you now have a page on Facebook or whatever is to announce it on your website, or in an email newsletter, or in your email signature.  This way, your contacts who want to participate will, and the others who don’t want to—won’t.  You don’t want them, anyway. 

Although you don’t want to bombard anyone you’ve ever emailed with friend requests, you do want to connect with net workers who approach you. If it seems like a real, live person and not a spammer, then friend them. Not to do so would be offensive and against the social media etiquette rules. 

Be professional at all times. Don’t tweet messages from Twitter that would offend some of your followers, for example. Remember that you never know who will read a message you post online or send out in a tweet!  

Don’t be too sales-y with your new friends, especially at first. People don’t like to feel used and it’s bad social manners to give someone the impression that you only want them as a friend to try and sell them something.  You do want to build your business, naturally.  But be tactful about it! 

Mind your manners in social media marketing and watch your business grow!

Social Media Marketing – Are You Doing It?

 Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing, which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks like You Tube, My Space, and Face book, social web application like dig, delicious, reddit, Wiki. The goal of each SMM program varies from business to business, but mainly involves building of brand awareness, increasing visibility and through this, sells a product or service. 

Social Media Marketing is becoming an essential marketing tool for connecting with customers and optimizing online presence. Social Media describes the tools and platforms, people use to publish, converse and share content online. Video, pod cast, blogs, discussion boards and social networking sites are all tools, online businessmen can use to build relationship with their customers and keep them on websites longer. Social media provides more opportunities for organizations to present optimized content that can be indexed by search engines and ultimately improves site rating. 

To implement some of the social media elements, it is first important to evaluate your customers to create an effective strategy. If your consumers are professionals who commute, then pod cast can be downloaded and can be very effective. Posting video content on YouTube is a unique opportunity to improve your position in Google’s universal search results. WithYouTube, customers can visit the site, view your video and easily post to their own blogs, social networking profiles or websites. YouTube is a great way to reach a broader viewer and generate buzz around new products, especially if your product has a visual appeal.  Building healthy relationship with the customer, that last is an on-going process for a businessperson. Social media takes this a step further by making that relationship personal through blogs. It tells about you, not only about your product or service.  A blog, which includes video, pictures and text, can build interest and loyalty among customers and a new way to search engine optimization. Create a page dedicated to community with website visitors and this will be interactive. 

Social media encourages social visits to your site. Keep adding content to encourage customers to return regularly. With the advent of social media, consumers have become contributors, contributing to brand messaging. SMM is related to other online tactics such as SEO, SMO. It has a more active planned role in directing, influencing and suggesting the community members.

You Still Think Facebook and Social Media Is A Fad For Business? Think Again.

So do you still think Facebook and Social Media is a FAD!!!  Today’s business is moving at the speed of light, so it can be hard to keep up. Should you incorporate social networking into your business and if so, then how do you make that happen? I recently ran across a very interesting video that may help you think about Facebook and Social Media in a new way!  Are you ready to jump in?  Don’t get left behind.

Social Media Marketing: Friends With Benefits

Nowadays, social media marketing is very much akin to a friends with benefits type of situation.  

Always bear in mind when thinking about and planning social media marketing campaigns and strategy that you have to focus more on making friends than selling your products and promoting your business!  

Social media is just that, social. In order to utilize social media marketing effectively, it is important for you to understand and realize that fact.  

Be friendly. Be sociable. Be somebody that other people want to get to know better instead of only trying to be somebody people will buy things from.  

Actually, one of the basic tenets of salesmanship is that people will buy from those people they like. So, if you are likeable and friendly on social sites, you will certainly be much more likely to make sales to the friends and followers you acquire along the way!  

One word of caution: If you are not yet active in social media marketing but plan to be in the near future, you had better go ahead and reserve the user name you want to have on the social sites you plan to frequent.  

All of the major social media communities such as Facebook and Twitter are growing at astounding rates and adding new members daily.  

So, this might well be a situation of he who hesitates is lost, because if you wait long, someone else will probably grab the user name you want.  

When using SEO with social media, though, keep in mind that you are writing for real people, not a search engine. Remember that you are addressing friends, not Google. Make your Twitter tweets and Facebook Wall posts, etc. accordingly!  

If you go at social media marketing expecting to run it solely in a business-like way with lots of sales hype, you’ll be doomed before you even get started.  

Think of social media marketing more along the lines of friends with benefits that can help you grow your online business!

Social Blogging Will Attract The Masses

If you watch teenagers these days they are forever texting each other. I dare not ask what about – but they do spend all day with their fingers on that keypad. Of course I am talking about cell phones and some reports suggest that teens spend more on text messages than on actual calls.

Social blogging seems to be the ‘grown up’ form of texting. It certainly has a big following with many of the top web identities having a ‘twitter’ or ‘plurk’ accounts. The difference between texting through a cell phone and social bookmarking is the audience.

Cell phone texting is generally one to one. Social blogging is one to many – thousands perhaps for some. Where social blogging is making its mark is in it’s ability to deliver visitors. Twitter allows the ‘twittering’ of posts from blogs via RSS feeds.

This becomes an instant message to the world that you have a new post and what the topic is. Those interested can immediately access that post. Is it important? In one way – very!

With respect to bloggers, particularly the big namers, getting an early advice on a new post means you can jump in, read the post and leave a comment – at the top of comments. Believe it or not this is important. If your comment is in the first five, every other commenter will most likely read what you have had to say.

If your comments are valid there is a good chance they will visit your site. Furthermore, comments near the top are more likely to get a response from the blogger than those lost in the 15 or 20 comments that come afterwards.

Social blogging is definitely here to stay. If you can learn to use is effectively you can benefit your site and your reputation.