by Ben Francia |Last Updated: August 16, 2011 
It’s an understatement when someone says that social media has taken the Internet by storm. In fact, some people think that social media IS the Internet. This essentially means that overall, most of the traffic from all over the world go to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
True enough, Internet marketers have found the perfect opportunity to close in on these goldmines and market their products from there. The sad fact is that most of them do social media marketing wrong. So wrong, in fact, that their form of social media does their business more harm than good.
In any case, these mishaps come from the way they start their campaign. To start things right, you’ve got to take note of a few key points that contribute to your campaign.
- Know the ropes – You need to know what kind of forest you’re travelling in before you venture into it. Get to know social media for what it is and what it can do for you. Familiarize yourself with the linggo and the trends and you’ll do relatively well.
- Declare your goals – You have to ask yourself: Why do I want to employ a social media strategy? Do I want to increase my leads? Do I want to make sales through social media? In any campaign, it’s important to declare your goals before taking it head on. So make a list of things you want to achieve and create action points to achieve it.
- Know your audience – As a marketer, you’ve got to know what your audience wants and needs. Deliver these without expecting anything in return and you’ll find it easy to earn trust and become a figure of authority.
- Know your places – There’s a little something that most Internet marketers don’t get. While it’s true that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube draw in a lot of traffic, they think that these are the only places they need to be in. That’s just wrong – depending on your niche, those three social media sites aren’t the only places you can gain influence in.
Look for niche specific sites that have a community interface and make friends from there. Interact, provide value and show its citizens that you’re someone worth talking to. You can sell stuff from there.
- Generate content – In social media, it’s not only about conversation and engagement. It’s also about giving VALUE to your audience. What you need to do is come up with a list of blogs that are related to your niche and share its posts.
After you’ve done that, you can now share links, videos and other forms of information that your audience really likes without going through the hassle of creating content on your own. That means more time to engage and more time to work on other matters.
- Create a list of guidelines – It’s awesome to create a list of guidelines for every single thing you do for your social media campaign. From periodic postings to comment responding, having a set of guidelines that tells you what to do when a situation comes up makes things easier for you.
Make sure that these guidelines, however, are based on fact and are helpful to your campaign.
- Optimize your profile – Look at it this way: Your profile information is sort of like your resume. You want to tell people why they want and should believe you. You also want to put in a few choice keywords relevant to your niche here and there. Most of the time, profile pages are indexed by search engines, hence, you get to amplify your business’ online presence.
Keep in mind that in any business, starting out will always be shaky. What’s important is that you hit those key points so you know what works, what doesn’t work and what could’ve worked better.
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