Social Media Marketing Strategies

My last post touched on 10 tools that business and individuals can use for listening in social media. In this post I want to highlight some of the more popular tools, and touch upon some general thoughts for personal branding and self promotion, using social media.

Remember the key to your success is your network. Your impact is only as good as the network you associate with. These tools will give you minimal value and success without the support and distributors of your network. Power in numbers is the name of the game when trying to promote and spread brand awareness. Grow your online networks. The larger your network is, the larger your presence is, plain and simple.

Here are some of the practices I preach and also follow for promoting brand awareness and getting others to participate.

• To quote Louis Gray on FriendFeed “Be yourself, and Mike will Like it.” Be authentic, be original, be honest, and most importantly remember to be yourself. Remember a fake is easily spotted and quickly revealed.

• Promote others, even more than you promote yourself. Share, Share and Share!

• Comment on others people’s blogs when applicable and also provoke conversation on your own blog, or micro blogging platforms that you participate on.

• Don’t promote or spam all your content. Save it for the best only!

• The material that you create should be something that people want to share. It should be for the most part relevant to your networks’ interests. Create newsworthy, thoughtful, intelligent content that has immediate usefulness.

• If you build it they will come. Assuming your network is in place, be patient. Good content will get noticed, StumbledUpon, Dugg, Tweeted, Bookmarked and broadcast. Social networking and spreading the word is bound by geographical locations and time zones.

• Build relationships with key influencers in all the communities and platforms that you participate on. Relationships take time to develop and grow in time.

• Persistence overcomes resistance.

Your personal brand starts with your domain name:

• Reserve your domain name. If possible, a dot com extension should always be your first choice.
• Install a blogging platform. Wordpress is the route to go, but they all accomplish the same task.
• Decide on the subjects you will write about, and stick the course.
• Stay active, create, comment, collaborate, and share as often as possible.
• Ensure you use the same username and profile image on all your service profiles and url’s.
• Establish Twitter, FriendFeed, FaceBook and Linkedin accounts.
• Establish multiple social bookmarking accounts. Dont forget to also include StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit.
• Establish a Google Reader account. Add and find relevant RSS feeds with Toluu,
• Establish a FeedBurner account, and install RSS icons on your site. Include text links for RSS subscriptions as well.
• Establish an opt-in mailing list for your site or blog.
• Network, Network, Network
• Link back to bloggers and story sources. Spread the link love when circumstances permit.
• Become an expert in your field, and surround yourself with the tools to accomplish this.

RSS/Google Reader:

RSS in combination with Google Reader is the easiest tool used for sharing. I believe it is the most powerful tool you can use for self promotion and others. Google Reader is mandatory for discovery, digestion and redistribution. Everyone that you network and follow whom you deem relevant should be in your Google Reader. When you post quality content, others will share it, and it’s only polite to do the same.

When you find interesting items on Google Reader, you can choose to share those items with your Gmail chat contacts, or with a list of Friends you create. In addition, you can share with people automatically, so your shared items appear in their friends’ shared items feed, in their Google Reader. Make it a point to subscribe to any of your contact’s Google Reader feeds that share the same interests. Google Reader also automatically creates a public page for any items that you mark as “shared.” You can also choose to create public pages for your starred items, or for items you have marked with a particular tag. My Google Reader public page is located here. Share your Google Reader on your Facebook and FriendFeed account.

Put a clip on your site:

You can share the content that you and your peers create through Google Reader. Copy and paste an HTML snippet into any web page or blog that supports JavaScript. This is also very good idea for SEO purposes as well.

Twitter:

• Make your content asTwitter friendly as possible.
• Build relationships with other Twitter users.
• Use Twitter only to broadcast your best stuff.
• Listen, Listen, Listen.
• Direct message or @ new followers – thank them for following.
• If you want people to re-tweet your content, append “please retweet” to your tweet.
• Don’t send out tweets just because you feel you must. Focus on quality over quantity. Use in-between time to be a helpful and good listener.

FriendFeed:

• Participate actively on Friendfeed.
• Build, Build and Build your network especially on FriendFeed
• Import all your services into FriendFeed.
• Create lists and rooms for your content objectives.
• like and comment often.

Social Media/Social-Bookmarking Sites:

Social bookmarking is a service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. These type of sites do provide a slow stream of targeted traffic. They also increase your brands relevancy and ranking in search engines.

Del.icio.us: This is the most popular and widely used social bookmarking service.

Diggo: This is another popular social bookmarking service, I prefer this over Del.icio.us but I use them both. Diggo has more community features, also Diggo allows you to bookmark pages simultaneously to Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us.

StumbleUpon:

• Don’t spam, stumbles lots of other content besides your own site.
• Find people interested in your topic and connect to them.
• Find niche groups related to your topic and join them.
• Stumble your networks content often.

Professional Social Networking Sites:

LinkedIn: Is a popular social networking site where headhunters, alumni, business associates, recent graduates and other professionals connect online. Promote and sell you personal brand here.

Facebook: Facebook has plenty of opportunities for networking, event promotion. Facebook is also a great place, to promote and spread your brand awareness.

These are just a few of the most popular methods. There are many out there, so pick and choose what works best for you. You want to be omnipresent.

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Related posts:

1. 10 tools for listening in social media.
2. 35 Tips for getting started with social media
3. Best Practices in Social Media Marketing
4. Staying active in social media.
5. Social Media, Learn to Crawl Before you Walk