Managing Your Social Network: Dos and Don’ts
This is a guest post from Carrie Oakley. Social profiles are more the norm than the anomaly today; most people have more than one because they don’t want to miss…
The connection between content, strategy and social media
There is a direct relation between content, strategy and your social media presence. All three are driving each other to give you optimal results provided you can create a harmonious relationship between them. Content strategy comes first because this is the foundation of your online presence. Without a content strategy you create a directionless content and this creates a blurry social media presence for you, for your business and for your brand. Once you have a strategy in place you have a solid grounding underneath.
Your well-defined content gives you a recognizable presence on social media. People recognize you by the thoughts you share through your content. Since consistency is a must therefore a need for strategic publishing.
What is conversation marketing?
In the age of social media and social networking it is all about conversation marketing. It really matters what people talk about your business and how they perceive it. Word-of-mouth marketing and advertising is more effective compare to conventional form of advertising that is also often called “push marketing”: you’re simply pushing your marketing messages and then leaving it up to the audience to decide how they want to react.
Conversation marketing on the other hand works on the principle of two-way communication. You are constantly striking up conversations. Instead of constantly promoting your products and services you make people familiarize with your presence so that they can directly talk to you. You no longer remain a cryptic (more often a shady) entity constantly beaming out marketing messages and advertisements. You become a human being who listens to people and then personally responds to them. Even if they have some issues regarding your product or service you interact with them instead of through your call center employees who give very standardized replies.
My understanding of social media marketing
I am gradually wetting my feet in the turbulent pool of social media marketing. Although I’m always a late entrant into all Internet trends eventually it is the business side that I come face-to-face with. It happened with connectivity: I got my Internet connection quite late compared to my friends but once I got it, while my friends were chatting and downloading “naughty stuff” I was looking for business opportunities on the Web. Similarly I started publishing a business blog in those days when we manually used to add pages under a folder and nobody had heard of Blogger and Wordpress. Sadly, I am still in the beginning phase of blogging while creating multiple successful blog for my clients.
The same pattern almost happened with social media: although I adopted social media in its early days I don’t have a significant presence. Ironically I am already consulting 4 clients (2 from Europe and 2 from America) devise and implement their social media strategies. Anyway, in this block post I have endeavoured to communicate my understanding of social media marketing.
How Not To Depend Much On Search Engines
It is a precarious situation to be in if most of your traffic originates from search engines. What if tomorrow something happens — some sort of misunderstanding or some algorithmic mishap — and all your links on the search engines are gone and even if they are not gone you have lost rankings for all your important keywordis and search terms? Scary, isn’t it? Even I am in such a situation. There have to be alternative ways of getting targetted traffic to your website or blog.