There is more to social media marketing than merely expanding your own network. Every business owner is now using various social media marketing campaign because it has become a crucial element in their marketing efforts.

It used to be that people would join various online communities to interact with friends, make new connections, and communicate with colleagues. However, today, even business owners are using social media to establish relationships, encourage business exposure, and understand what customers want.

Social media marketing provides a two-way communication between business owners and clients, something that is unheard of in traditional marketing methods using TV, radio, newspaper and/or phone book. With social media, customers are given a voice to air any concerns and as well as provide a venue to contact vendors, suppliers and express feedback.

Increasing exposure using social media

Social media has become the most effective albeit cheap way to build public relations. There is no need for media contacts or high advertising costs in radio, TV or newspapers. All there is to do is to participate in various social media networks to increase business exposure and establish relationships in your niche market.

Everything starts with relevant content. Create and distribute relevant content that people would enjoy reading or watching. If they loved what you posted, they will share that content with their friends and their friends will share to their own friends as well. This will encourage business exposure.

Great content can range from articles, videos pictures, podcasts, and others. Any marketing materials must be branded with your own business name and logo in order to turn your content into valuable business exposure.

Establish strategic relationships using social media

Ideally, you need to add as many contacts and followers as you can from your social networking pages. However, it is important to build quality relationships rather than focusing on the quantity of your friends and followers. When you build great relationships, you are likely to increase profits and promote business exposure.

Search for partners in your own niche market and offer services that are complimentary to theirs. If you are able to connect with them on various social media networking sites, you can exchange mutually beneficial referrals that will eventually lead to increased revenues.

In order to increase exposure, it is best to find strategic partners that have excellent social influence on your target audience. These partners many not directly refer clients to you but they could contribute to your popularity by being endorsed by them.

Learn more about your customers using social media

Social media is an excellent way to understand your own market. Customers often ask questions and share insights on social media sites. Listen to what potential clients want and need so you can build a product or business that resolves all their concerns.

If you are still not on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, this is the best time to start creating your own profiles and grow your online business.

Link between Social Media and The Public Relations Industry

Public relations professionals were one of the first to utilize social media to improve business. They used social media to encourage brand awareness for various companies. Rather than putting out a long form press release, PR professionals shifted to “social media release”
According to the director of public relations at Cisco Systems, David McMulloch, “The press release of the future will deliver its content in text, video, SMS, microblog and podcast form, to any choice of device, whenever the reader decides, and preferably it will be pre-corroborated and openly rated by multiple trusted sources.”

Social media PR trends

Researches from a joint study conducted by the Transworld Advertising Agency Network and Worldcom Public Relations Group show that:
- 28% of PR firms disclosed that 15%-33% of their revenue came from social media last year
- This percentage has grown by 44% in 2011
- The PR industry is more effective in terms of leveraging social media as compared to ad agencies

IBIS World, an industry research firm, predicted the following trends:
- PR firms are likely to grow at an average rate of 5.7% to $12.8 billion annually from 2010-2015
- The growth in PR firms is mainly due to increased demand of many companies wanting PR firms to manage daily interactions with target audiences and press on popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook
- The shift from traditional media to social media will result in PR companies concentrating on utilizing blogs, social media sites, podcasts and mobile media to promote products or services
- More than 80% of PR companies are expecting an increase in social media work in the near future

Managing Public Relations Through Social Media

In order to utilize social media effectively in your PR pitch, it is important that you make your message distinct among others. In order to do so, consider the following tips:
1) Keep the press release simple by omitting overused words like any of the following:
mission-critical applications to improve business processes
cutting-edge
These words may be fancy but if you are using Twitter, you only have 140 characters to work with and you need to make sure you get your tweet right.
2) Never spam. Bloggers, journalists and editors will not appreciate it when you send them tweets or messages on Facebook. Familiarize yourself with your own contact by checking their profiles or blogs before sending them any messages. Ideally, you need to identify the real experts in your niche so you will not waste time and effort on bloggers and journalists who are covering markets that are in no way, related to your own market.
3) Create unique but relevant content. As a PR professional, you are expected to be an expert at turning even the most boring announcement into an interesting piece. Excellent content will not only give you the required media coverage but it will also generate leads.
4) Keep track of what people say about your company in various social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, etc. and respond quickly if needed. Data analytics tools allow you to gauge consumer sentiment for your brand and assess the effectiveness of your communication techniques.

There is more to social media PR than just publishing press releases on Facebook or twitter. Social media PR is an effective tool to connect with journalists, bloggers and consumers in your market.

What is Social Media?

Essentially, social media is Web 2.0 comprising of blogs, wikis, long tail keywords, RSS and other tools that changed the way we use the internet today, making the web more interactive than ever.

It used to be that websites are just static pages where users put up a site in hopes that visitors will read and be interested with the products or services they offer. In short, websites were just regarded as online brochures. However, in 2004, Amazon.com started adding user comments on their pages. This paved the way for potential customers to rely more on user comments instead of product reviews written by the manufacturers or Amazon before purchasing certain products.

On eBay, a seller gets a rating from previous buyers each time he or she sells something. These ratings will gauge the trustworthiness of a seller, which influences the sales as well as how sellers generally conduct their business.

Web 2.0 key elements: Participation

Through various social media platforms, users are able to give their insights and actively participate in any conversations online. These insights are made public so that other users can read and even share them.

Web 2.0 key elements: Easy access

Users can easily access webpages, plugins, mobile phones and other Web 2.0 online.

Web 2.0 key elements: Customization

Social media provides the ability to customize information the way users want it published. The perfect example would be Google Mapping, where one can plot members of a certain community on a map and show the location of each one.

Web 2.0 key elements: Conversation

Social media made it possible for two-way communication in real time. Instant messaging through Skype or Yahoo! Messengers made it possible for people all over the world to converse in real time no matter how far they are from one another.

Web 2.0 key elements: Network building

If have been unable to find old friends and you want to get in touch with them, social media makes it possible to do so. Additionally, you can meet new people and widen your network online.

Social media allows you to find old friends that you have not been in touch with, make new friends, and build a network that can be influenced by the things that you do and visa versa.

Web 2.0 key elements: Sharing and Openness

Social media made it possible for people to post videos, podcasts, articles and share them to a wider audience instantly. Social media leveled the playing field and allowed for creating and posting what used to be classified documents.

Web 2.0 key elements: User-generated Content

Various social media channels allow virtually anyone to create and distribute user-generated content where millions of people can access them quickly and easily. There is no need to build your own webpage as well as other tools needed to put your content out.

Social media marketing is a powerful marketing tool but you need to know how to use it properly. Its power lies in its far-reaching nature. It allows you potential customers by the millions. However, it can cause considerable damage to your business if you do not try to understand how it works.

The following are important social media guide on how to leverage the power of social media for your online or offline business:

Be polite on social networks

Connecting with people online is no different than meeting people on a live social gathering. If you are great in terms of interacting with different people, then your following is sure to grow.

Mind your manners and do not put people off. Your objective is to build connections with loyal followers and not to turn people away by being rude. Avoid abrasive remarks. Be engaging, honest and never spam.

The fact is, social media is fun even if you are joining in as a serious online business owner. You can laugh with potential clients, share insights, stories and offer help whenever it is needed. Generally, you need to be someone people want to talk to online.

Stop too much promotion

While your main objective is to sell products or services using social media sites, sounding like an overzealous car salesman on Facebook and Twitter is never a good idea. Your business page must contain relevant information that your customers can benefit from like effective tips, strategies, tricks, how-to articles, demo videos, etc.

Keep strong opinions to yourself

Just like in any social gathering, avoid talking about controversial topics like religion or politics. Although you are entitled to your own opinion, beliefs, etc., lecturing the rest of your people in your page about it is not a great way to start widening your network.

Social media allow people to interact with potential and existing customers on a more personal level, which is very much unlike traditional advertising methods. It should be used as a means to know what your customers want and need. Additionally, it can be used to determine what people are saying about the product or service you offer. Your social media experience should be a pleasant and enjoyable one so don’t take too lightly but don’t take too seriously at the same time.

Social Media Marketing or SMM is an online promotional strategy which involves using social media sites to encourage brand awareness or drive traffic back to a certain site. On the other hand, Social Media Optimization or SMO speeds up the process of SMM by integrating key elements to a certain content in order to spread the message across big social websites.

SMO strategies may include adding RSS feeds, embedding a Share This or Digg button on each post. These buttons allows for the incorporation of Flickr pjoto galleries, YouTube videos and various social media portals. Social media optimization is another form of search engine marketing.

The person credited for the invention of the term SMO is Rohit Bhargava, who wrote the five rules of applying social media optimization, which has now grown to 17, thanks to contributions from other people like Jeremiah Owyang, Cameron Olthuis, Loren Baker, and Lee Odden.

Increasing linkability

One of the most effective way to improve organic Google search listings is to increase the links with authority sites. Social media optimization can improve your inbound links through blogs, press releases, , keyword targeted articles, RSS feeds, white papers, etc.

Easy Tagging and Bookmarking

You have the option to allow readers to approve and rate your content by adding tagging links like Technorati, Del.icio.us and Digg buttons on your site. Ideally, you also need to add tagging links to inside pages of your sites and not just on the homepage.

Reward inbound links

You can reward people who linked their site to yours by putting a “Recently Linked” section on your site. This will not only add exposure to people who linked their site to your site, you are bound to get more back links as well.

Content submission

You want your content to reach as many people as possible. In order to do so, you need to submit your content to relevant and high-traffic websites.

Encourage the mash up

YouTube makes it easy for users to mash videos onto your site, complete with a link back to YouTube and a YouTube Logo as well. By encouraging a mash up with other social media sites, it makes it easy for other sites to use your content or reference it to drive traffic to your site.

Be a source of information

Effective social media marketing is more than just generating traffic to your site and earning online profits. You must be the source of relevant information to visitors. In addition, consider putting links from other sites even though it contributes nothing to your site traffic. By linking other sites to yours, you have all information visitors need on just a single location.

Rewarding valuable users

Basically, a valuable user is one that not only send traffic to your site but also assisting visitors or adding valuable information on your website. Whatever contributions they provide to your business, it is important to reward them by sending a personal thank you message or a simple shout-out of their efforts on your homepage.

Participate

Apart from posting and sharing content, you need to participate on the topic as well. Just make sure you are sharing relevant information on other websites or blogs that are part of your niche. You can also join certain social groups, forums and respond to feedbacks on your own posts, videos, audios, etc.

Know how to target your audience

It is important to note that you cannot make everyone be interested in your content. With this in mind, make sure you conduct your own marketing research to determine the best places to post your content, places where it will be understood and appreciated.

Create content

Start creating content in various forms like an article, video, widget, white paper or even a tweet. Your aim should be to capture the interest of your visitors by giving them relevant pieces of information which will encourage them to share this information to other people.

Key Factors of Social Media

There is more to social media than just a mere trend. It has been a crucial part of how people in today’s world interact. It is likely that Social Media will continue to play a key role in online communication in the future. In this article, we will discuss social media’s key factors.

Social media key elements: Tagging

Tagging is a process in which labels are assigned to certain information resource. By assigning tags on a video or article, you classify the content based on how people think instead of taxonomies adopted by a library. Rather than searching through rows of categories, which often are hard to understand, tagging makes it easy to find what you are looking for.

3 Key Factors of Social Media that get missed

Social media key elements: AJAX, Google Maps, Gmail

AJAX is a tool, which allows for embedding programming codes on static Web pages for a richer user experience. One of the best example of this is Google Maps. Google Maps allow users to scroll on certain maps, zoom in and out, and overlay the satellite view.

Social media key elements: PageRank, eBay Reputation, Amazon Reviews

PageRank, eBay’s Reputation, and Amazon Reviews allow users to contribute to the current going-ons of these sites.

Social media key elements: Google AdSense

Google AdSense allows users to generate income from online ads on their sites or blogs. In order to make money online through Google AdSense, complete the sign-up form for an account and add the programming code on the site. Google will automatically review the site and grabs ads that contain long-tail keywords on various topics. Google will then put up an ad on your side, where you given a percentage of each dollar earned from these ads. All of these will happen without any human intervention.

Social media key elements: blogs

Blogs allow people to participate instead of merely distributing content online. Other readers can comment on certain blog posts and you, as the owner of the blog, can jump into the conversation as well.

Social media key elements: collaboration

Wikipedia is an online platform that allows one to put a piece of content and others to update the content as well. Essentially, Wikipedia encourages all users to contribute to the end product.

Social media key elements: decentralization

BitTorrent encourages radical decentralization, allowing users to upload content using millions of different computers all over the world instead of storing the data on a handful of serves.

Social media key elements: systems that improve with use or adapt to users

When you use Google to search for a certain term, you will find that the search results will vary when you use different computers. This occurs because Google “learns” a user’s interest through the number of times one click on terms. The search engine also takes note how fast a user can come back to that and how long he or she spends time on a certain page. Pages with a significant bounce backs will be on top of the searches , while low-traffic pages will remain at the bottom of the searches.

Social media key elements: user behavior not predetermined

What we have done for years is create a flow chart where a certain user;s behavior is predetermined. Social media now makes it possible for users to design their own systems based on how they want it to work rather than just clicking a simple Yes or No, which is essentially predetermined by some programmers.

Social media key elements: ratings and reviews

It used to be that one has to read various consumer reports before deciding whether or not to purchase a certain product. However, Web 2.0 can now gather and read reviews rated by millions of people who purchased the same product, giving users access to relevant user feedback as opposed to generated product report published by the manufacturers, which may have been influenced in one way or another.

Do you have the Social Media Mindset?

If done right, social media marketing can help you create an incredibly powerful moneymaking business but if not done correctly, you waste time, money, and efforts. The key to successful social profit formula and social media marketing is to have the right mindset, a mindset that is also consistent with your target audience.

For most internet marketer, social media mindset and social media is a sales tool. However, for the audience, social media is a community where they can interact with one another. In this community, there are certain rules that need to be followed. If you want to be successful in your social marketing campaign, you must comply with all the rules and try to fit in to the norms of the community. If you violate any of the set rules, you could face punishment.

Key mindsets for social media marketing success

There are four important things to observe for a successful social media marketing campaign. They are:

• No Sales Pitching
• Participate
• Add Value
• Transparency
• No Pitching

Never actively pitch a certain product, site, or services in any social media medium.There are ways to sell a certain product or services without actively selling them online. There is a difference between active pitching and recommending something to your visitors or readers, because you feel that this is the kind of information they are looking for.

However, before you give any recommendations, make sure you have established a credible reputation within the community for people to take your word for it. You cannot waltz in and start pitching sites products, services right away. This will just turn visitors away and you will also end up getting negative feedbacks or criticism from other users. Do not waste months of marketing efforts go to waste for a single post that asks people to buy your products.

Participate to achieve proper social media mindset

By actively participating, you widen your network of friends and fan, enhance brand positioning, and build SEO value by getting incoming links. Think of social media as more like an investment. The more you participate, the higher the return will be.

Get into your social media mindset and Add Value, lots of it

Just like the rules of search engines, social media will reward people who aim for the good of others rather than of themselves first. If you provide readers with free information on a regular basis and aggregate content from other people, you are bound to be rewarded for your efforts. However, do not just give away information just for the sake of it. Give away relevant information. Boost your value to the community by positioning yourself as a great source of relevant information. Share information that are beneficial to other people.

Transparency

Transparency is one of the most important mindset in social media. Always be straightforward and honest in all marketing activities you do. If you try to beat the system or use people for your own advantage, the community will ostracize you.

Social media, for the most part, is not a get-rich-quick-scheme. You are building the foundation of a profitable business, which will be operating six months to six years from now. Although the Social Profit Formula will teach you social media mindset and  certain strategies that will provides quick and easy results, your mindset will determine the success or failure of your business in the marketplace.