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So I just unfriended someone on my personal facebook account. I use the word ‘friend’ loosely because I didn’t know this person – it was one of those random friend requests who I tend to just accept if they have similar interests to mine (in this case salsa dancing).

Since adding them a few days ago I’ve had 2 messages in my inbox which have both been marketing messages – goodbye!

- Accepting your friend request does not equal ‘opting-in’ to your ‘list’ –

This is something a lot of marketers need to get into their heads when using social media to build their business. It is very easy to reach a lot of people through these networks and that can be good and bad, depending on how you do it. Let’s have a look at both approaches and the effects they both have:

The bad way - You join all these networks, go through searching and adding as many people as you can then start marketing directly to them.

Results:

• You annoy a lot of people who will ‘unfriend’ you
• Probably get your business labelled as spammy.
• Yes you might make a few sales but at what longer term cost?

The good way – You join these networks, go through searching and adding as many people as you can then start sharing content with them. This can be content on your business website or blog that adds value to these visitors and also pre-sells on you and your business.

Results – If they like what they’ve seen so far they are a lot more likely to:

• Take you up on your offer.
• If not they might refer someone else (that’s leverage!)
• link to you from their website or blog (free traffic and search engine improvements)
• share your free and high quality content with their groups of friends (that’s leverage!)
• Sign up for your newsletter (that’s opting-in to recieve marketing messages).
• There’s also a high chance that the next time you share some good free content with your social network they’ll check it out.

Effective Social Media Marketing in 5 Easy Steps

For some people creating relevant, useful and compelling content to share is a breeze. For others it’s a bit daunting. If you fall into the latter catagory then here are some steps you can take to quickly research and create something worth sharing:

1. Do some keyword research – Use something like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find some phrases that have large search volumes

2. Do some Q&A research – Go to places like Yahoo Answers and plug in your high search volume phrases (from step 1) and see what comes out. Look for recurring topics, questions, answers and find a popular one.

3. Find a way that your product/service/offer helps solve the problem, answer the question and generally help your target customer achieve the end result that’s the goal of whatever the question is related to.

4. Create a quick ‘how-to’ guide on how to achieve the end result the question is related to in X amount of steps.

5. Put this guide onto your website or blog with a call to action at the end to see how your product/service/offer can help them achieve this goal that much more quickly/effectively/guaranteed.

6. Summarise this guide into a bitesize chunk and share that with your social networks. A title or short description and a link to the full article on your site.

In Summary

Using this method you’re using social media the way it is intended to be used – and growing your business in the process. This intermediary step of creating and sharing content is vital, and as you’ve just seen.. it shouldn’t be that hard at all.

If you’re interested in learning more about implementing effective social media and other internet marketing strategies for your business please get in touch here

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