| There is a lot of buzz these days about the power, effectiveness and affordability of Social Media. However, with the abundance of choices in Social Media outlets, knowing where to concentrate your efforts and how to leverage them to interact with your target market can be overwhelming. When most people think of Social Media, they quickly think of facebook, twitter, YouTube and the networks that receive the most media attention. After all, if everybody else is doing it, it must be the place to be. While it is true that these forums host a multitude of members, it is also becoming increasing difficult to compete with the media noise of these sites and get your message heard.
Cover all of your bases. Choose a social network to join that can effectively reach your target audience. It could be facebook or it may be one of the countless niche social communities out there. Yes, there is a network for any type of enthusiast.
Create a simple profile on several of the multi-media forums to get your message out there. Post a video and make your presence on YouTube, or the hundreds of other video hosting networks. Same goes for your photos on flickr, or the hundreds of other photo hosting networks. Don’t forget Yelp!, where you can communicate directly with customers who review your business. These are the foundations for a respectable, manageable Social Media presence. It may seem like this is a monumental task, but a small investment of time creating these profile will get you into the game.
Invest in yourself. What most people fail to recognize is that you can create and harness your own Social Media presence through your blog. If you start a blog now, you will be building an asset for your business for which you maintain complete control. Your blog is also a goldmine for Social Media outreach. A blog serves as a hub to house all of your Social Media outlets and can feed into your other Social Media networks. Write on your blog and have it appear on your facebook page. Upload a video to YouTube and link it on your blog. These are simple applications that can be built into your network and help broaden your Social Media exposure. Your blog can also archive your old newsletters, allow for social bookmarking of your entries, allow people to subscribe for real time updates via e-mail or RSS feeds, provide a public forum to host comments about your postings, etc..
Time is money. The one main reservation for getting involved with Social Media is always a concern for time. It may seem that you have to spend all of your days in these spaces, making sure you don’t miss a conversation. With Social Media, many conversations about your brand are already taking place. You can simply monitor these conversations with an easy-to-manage news tracker (such as Google alerts) and capitalize on any conversation, good and bad. Keep in mind that you can harness the power of user-created content. Have your customers submit photos or write reviews. Invite them to be guest writers on your blog. Once you begin creating your Social Media presence, ideally through your blog, it does not take a great deal of time to maintain it. One or two blog entries per week are plenty. In a very short time, you can establish your Social Media presence and reap the benefits of going virtual.
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