Marketing via social media, or social marketing, has become quite widespread as the results it generates, both for identifying leads and making sales, are quite impressive. However, many beginners to online marketing claim that this style of promotion is ineffective. This, unfortunately, is because they go about it the wrong way and don’t follow the rules of proper social marketing.

1. Don’t hard sell. The first rule of proper social marketing is to avoid hard selling. You won’t win over any clients. Quite the opposite, in fact, as you will end up alienating people and you will end up putting in a lot of hard work for little return.

2. Offer value before you ask for anything. If you want to succeed with social marketing you need to communicate and provide value to people, first, before you start asking them to buy the products or services you are promoting. By providing value, you establish yourself as an authority in your field and people will trust you. Once they trust you, the likelihood of them buying from you is much higher, since consumers like to do business with people they know and trust.

3. Learn to listen. One important aspect of social marketing is that you can learn a lot about your prospects simply by listening to them. Rather than being the one doing all the talking, you can learn so much more about your market simply by listening to what they want. This way you will be able to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns over time but it will also provide you with important feedback which can be used to design your marketing approach in the first place.

4. Build relationships. Your first goal with social marketing should be to build relationships with your target audience. You need to nurture quality relationships built on trust and that means that you truly have to be interested in what people are saying. Don’t pretend. You are better off being honest and open as this will help you in the long term.

5. Create viral content. If you want to increase the exposure of your brand then you need to create content that people will find so interesting that they will want to share it with their own circle of friends. The more helpful and valuable your content is, the more people will share it and, implicitly, the more your network will grow.

6. Don’t spam. Spamming has become a serious problem in social marketing as many internet marketers do not understand the medium at all. The problem with spamming people with sales messages is that they eventually get annoyed and will stop following you. They certainly won’t be buying anything you are selling just because you send them five messages every hour advertising your new offer. In fact, spamming is the one thing that will guarantee the death of your business, irrespective of the area you are in, whether it’s network marketing or selling your own product.

Social marketing can be an extremely powerful tool and should be an integral part of your overall marketing approach. However, to ensure its effectiveness, you should heed the aforementioned advice, which will lead to outstanding results.

Tags: how to social market, online social marketing, social marketing, viral social marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Internet 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.