Are you overwhelmed by all the social media information out there? Do you need visual aid to help you wrap your mind around social media marketing and how to use it to grow your revenues?
The goal of this article is to simplify social media marketing and to show you how all the different elements in the social media world interact with each other to help you get traffic for your website, exposure for your brand and sales for your company.
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1. Content
You can create a lot of different kinds of content. My advice is:

  1. Use common sense to filter out the types of content that won’t make sense for your business model.
  2. Try everything else.
  3. Measure results.
  4. Keep doing what works and get rid of everything else.

These are the most common types of content you can create:

  • Articles
  • Videos
  • Podcasts (video or audio podcasts)
  • Reports/white papers
  • Expert interviews (in text format, audio format or video format)
  • Resources (these are links to other people’s content, such as tools, articles, etc.)
  • Events (calls, webinars, contests, seminars, giveaways, charity events, etc.)

This is a great blog post on creating killer content.
2. Your Blog
Your blog is the hub of your social media marketing campaign. That’s where you want to drive people to.
3. Content Distribution Channels
These are all the other places you’ll be posting your content to. These are some of the most common content distribution channels:

  • Social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
  • Forums (a.k.a. message boards or discussion boards)
  • Groups (LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Google groups and Yahoo! groups)
  • Video sharing sites (YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, Yahoo! Video, etc.)
  • Social bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, etc.)
  • Other people’s audiences (there are several ways you can do this, such as guest blogging, asking people who have big email lists to broadcast your offer to their lists, asking a blogger to write about your product, etc.)
  • Article directories (such as EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleBase, etc.)
  • Podcast sites (like iTunes, PodcastAlley, etc.)
  • Email lists (blog subscribers, people that downloaded your free report, list of potential clients, current customers, etc.)
  • Blogs (you can’t post your articles on someone else’s blog without their permission, but you can use comment marketing to your advantage.)

There are two things you need to keep in mind:

  1. You are not going to use all the content distribution channels mentioned above. Just as with the content types, discard the obvious ones that won’t work for your campaign (such as video sharing sites if you don’t do videos), try everything else and get rid of what doesn’t work.
  2. Not all your content will go to all your content distribution channels. For example, you might want to promote your white paper on your blog and on video sharing sites but not on Facebook, and you might want to promote your next webinar using only Facebook Events.

My advice is this: “create a 2-column spreadsheet. In the left column put a list of your content pieces. In the right column put your content distribution channels. Then, for every piece of content, decide what channels you’ll use to promote it.”
This is a great blog post on finding your audience online.
4. Calls to Action
Pay attention to this because it’s one of the most important parts of social media. There are two things you want to do right:

  1. Get people that find your content in the distribution channels to visit your blog.
  2. Get your blog visitors to follow you through as many content distribution channels as possible.

OK, let’s talk about how to make it happen.
How to Get People that Stumble Upon Your Content to Visit Your Blog
The short answer is, “with a call to action”. This call to action should be related to the piece of content they stumbled upon. For example, in your soccer bloopers video you want your call to action to be something along the lines of “Visit www.mysite.com/blog for more soccer bloopers videos!”
How to Get Your Blog Visitors to Check Out Your Other Content Distribution Channels
The more ways someone is connected with you, the higher your chances are that they’ll see your content. Someone who follows you on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and is subscribed to your blog RSS feed is a lot more likely to see your content than someone who only follows you on Twitter. Different people prefer to follow other in different ways, so give them some options and let them choose.
On my blog I invite people to subscribe by email, RSS, follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

5. Public Relations
Not only do you want to attract the attention of potential clients; you also want to attract the attention of the press. The best way to do this? Do something newsworthy. I see so many press releases about new hires, companies giving discounts… they all look the same. You need to stand out by doing something very different. These are two great articles on creating newsworthy content:

6. Keywords Monitoring
One of the most effective social media tactics is to monitor the top keywords in your industry so when someone mentions them you can jump in and become part of the conversation. Let’s say you sell ballet shoes, your name is Jane Wolowicz and your site is BalletShoes.com. These are the keywords I would track:

  • “ballet shoes”
  • “ballet flat shoes”
  • “ballet shoe”
  • “buy ballet shoes”
  • “purchase ballet shoes”
  • “ballet shoes” best brand
  • “ballet shoes” where to buy
  • Jane Wolowicz
  • BalletShoes.com
  • BuyBalletShoes.com (your top competitor)

I use two tools to track keywords: Google Alerts and BrandMentions.
7. Network Development
Developing your network involves two different things:

  1. Quantitative growth: getting more Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, Twitter followers, email subscribers, etc. This helps you reach MORE people.
  2. Qualitative growth: talking to your social media connections. Remember, Social Media Marketing is all about making friends. This helps you build STRONGER connections that pay MORE ATTENTION to your messages.

VERY IMPORTANT: How to Grow Your Business Using Social Media Marketing
So far, we’ve talked about how you can get thousands of visitors to your blog. Now, let’s talk about how you can monetize your traffic. I have two suggestions for you:

  1. Have a soft offer and promote it heavily
    A soft call to action is something that doesn’t require people to spend money. It could be a free report, a free video series, a free trial or whatever you can offer for free. Because it’s free, you shouldn’t feel shy about promoting it. After all, you’re giving people something of great value in exchange for an email address. Once people opt-in, market your paid offer to them but don’t be too pushy; remember that they signed up for something free.
  2. Have a hard offer but don’t promote it much
    A hard offer is your paid product or service. You shouldn’t promote this much. People go to your blog for content, not to buy your stuff, so don’t annoy them by showing them specials. That being said, there’s nothing wrong with having a link to your e-store or “Our Services” page in your navigation menu and/or your sidebar. If people love your content, they’ll dig around to find out what you do.

A FREE Social Media Marketing Report
Did you like this post? I wrote a FREE Social Media Marketing report that will teach you all you need to know about Social Media. Get your FREE report from here: https://www.madfishdigital.com/social-media-marketing.html (scroll down and look for the report on the right side of the page).

Social Media in Plain English Social Media Marketing explained