At SociaLNK, the goal is to promote your business. How can Social Media Marketing (SMM) accomplish this? Our focus is threefold: (1) Listen To and Understand Customers, (2) Engage and Interact With Customers, and (3) Monitor and Analyse What Customers Are Saying About Your Business.

Listen and Understand
At your business, it is imperative that your product be good quality and relevant to the customer. Ideally, your customer service will be excellent as well. By providing customers with not only a useful product but also an attentive ear should something come up, you earn that customer’s loyalty.

Cartoon originally appeared on CustomersAreAlways.com

Engage and Interact

To promote your business, network. These days that means online interaction using social media. Create accounts on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Flickr—making certain these accounts are maintained regularly and are relevant to your product. Create a business blog to inform your customers of the news surrounding your business and genre.

Monitor and Analyse

Along with broadcasting your business’s latest endeavors, use social networks to encourage feedback from customers through surveys or simply by starting conversations. This enables you to, once again, listen to and understand what your customers need. And the cycle begins again.

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Additionally, it may be helpful to familiarize yourself with other businesses in your genre. How are they using SMM to promote themselves? How can you relate that to your own business model?

In case you were wondering, yes, social media is right for your small business. The important thing to remember when launching a social media marketing (SMM) strategy is simply to nail down a great plan, and don’t be overwhelmed by the process. SMM may seem like something your business should not invest in, but in today’s market it is becoming more of a necessity to reach out to consumers in this way. Recognize who your target audience is first. This will take a lot of the guesswork out of SMM. When you have narrowed down who you are reaching out to, then you can decide where that audience is (mostly on Facebook, for example) and focus your SMM energy there. Remember your plan. Do not let the vastness of the social media sphere scare you away from marketing there before you have begun to see progress. Keep your main goals for SMM in mind, along with your general marketing goals. Plug away and know that you are building long-term relationships with your customers. Remain an online presence. You must be willing to stay active with your chosen social media channels. If this is a problem for you, consider outsourcing to an individual or agency specializing in social media. See Results. Monitoring your progress can also be something a social media agency will handle for you. It is important to set up measurable goals so you can see your results and go on from there. Rebound. Change your plan, if need be. This will be a time of experimenting with where your greatest target audience is online, so if the results you see are not satisfactory, try something else. How do you use SMM for your small business? What fears do you have about doing so? Join the conversation by leaving a comment below.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is much more these days than simply raising your business’s ranking on the search engines. It is that, but more, now that social media is increasingly part of our everyday lives. A company needs to build trust and a good reputation across the social networking platforms in order to maintain high search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimization applied to Facebook is much different from SEO for Google or other common search engines. To engage in Facebook or Twitter (or any other social media), one must consider that status updates and messages are constantly moving and changing, literally at the speed of light. Also, there are multiple ways of gleaning information from Facebook, whereas a Google search remains fairly straightforward. Since over 350 million people have access to Facebook, it should go without saying that your company needs a Facebook profile. The ease of searching within the site while checking friends’ status updates will guarantee many searches happen on the Facebook website. If you are present, you can be found there. It is as simple as that. There are other ways for Facebook users to talk about you: they can chat, share a link, share information, join a group or fan page related to your company, or just update their status. Any of these ways could be used to talk about your company, so you should work to maintain a solid reputation as well as a high profile. All of this Facebook activity will have only indirect results for your SEO, but it will not go without reward. Because of the popularity of the Facebook platform, it will benefit you in SEO to maintain a presence there. How is your company engaging on Facebook or other social platforms? What can you improve to increase visibility of your profile?