Your Social Media Marketing Plan: 3 Steps to Success
There are more than 300 social media sites listed in the 2010 Social Media Directory. Inside those site are tens of thousands of groups. In those groups are hundreds of millions of people.
Imagine all the shows and conferences that are hosted at the Toronto Convention Centre each year happening in just one weekend. That's more than 1000 events in one building at the same time. It would be confusing, crowded, and overwhelming, just like social media seems to be.
Fortunately, social media is quite easy to navigate when you have a plan.
Before we jump into the three steps, remember that you need to have goals for every marketing effort. As you read through this article, be sure to have a copy of Social Media Goal Setting for Small Business near to hand. It's an article I wrote earlier for Technorati.
Start with your blog. It serves well as a place to share information, and supply all the typical components of a corporate-style website. You can easily create all the pages you've seen on other sites while gaining the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) advantages of a blog. (You can see why a blog is so important in my previous article Blogging is the Center of Social Media.)
Don't have a blog? That's fine. Simply go to any registrar to register a domain name for your blog and arrange hosting. Inside the control panel for your hosting account, many will offer you the option to install WordPress directly. If not, you can find easy instructions to download and install from WordPress directly.
The next step is to join a few sites. The place to start is with the Golden Trio - Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. (Get illustrated, step-by-step instructions for setting up your profiles.) These three sites offer you the widest reach for promoting yourself and your business.
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