Promote Your Brand With Social Media

By Phyllis Zimbler Miller

 If you think Twitter, Facebook, and other online social media communities are only for teens, you're missing out on valuable and free marketing platforms for your brand (book, business or product).

Further, if you're not on social media, you're risking losing your potential clients/customers to those smart business people who are utilizing social media.

Which social media platforms you focus on depends a great deal on what your brand is. Here are seven excellent reasons why you must use social media no matter what you are promoting:

1. It's the Most Cost-Effective Online Advertising
   The current most popular social media platforms being used for business are free: Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com. (LinkedIn does have an upgrade that costs, but it's not necessary to get this upgrade.) And this is "relationship" marketing to targeted markets. "Free" is definitely more cost-effective than spending money on online advertising techniques such as Pay Per Click or banner ads.
2. You Can Have Global Reach With Social Media
   The world is now a global marketplace. Why not reach this global market? Many of the most popular social media platforms have this global reach, and you can see this clearly illustrated on Twitter. At any time of day or night you can see real-time "tweets" from people in Japan, England, the U.S., India and many other countries. For example, if you have a book that might appeal to anyone in the world who reads in English, why limit yourself to just promoting in the U.S.? Thanks to Amazon people outside the U.S. can buy your book even if it is only available in U.S. stores.
3. You Can Attract Targeted Groups of People as Potential Clients/Customers for Your Brand
   Social media enables you to join groups of people with the same interests and goals. On LinkedIn and Facebook you can join groups as varied as Children's Book Writers to eMarketing. If you choose groups to join based on your brand, you'll be putting yourself in front of the exact groups of people you want to reach as potential clients/customers. This can pay off in increased sales for you.
4. You Can Form A Community by Using the Community Aspect of Social Media
   Once you are active on social media platforms and have people who are your followers (Twitter), your friends (Facebook) and/or your connections (LinkedIn), you can start groups of highly targeted interests. You can create a niche market in your brand, book or business and share your knowledge with others who join your community. These people can become your loyal followers, friends and connections - and they can help spread your marketing message to their followers, friends and connections.
5. You Can Use Social Media to Establish Your Expertise
   People like to do business with people they know, like and trust. By sharing your knowledge for free online with the people in the social media groups you belong to, you can establish yourself as an expert. This can pay off in increasing potential clients/customers' trust in you.
   And you can also receive invitations for blog "interviews" or BlogTalkRadio show interviews or podcasts. And these interviews lead to more free exposure for your brand and more free exposure for your expertise.
6. You Can Use Social Media to Find Cross-Promotional Partners
   Amazingly in the world of social media, people who would be considered competitors in the off-line world are teaming up to provide products and services to their combined clients/customers. And these clients/customers are very responsive to these cross-promotions (often called joint ventures) - especially when introduced to a second expert by a first expert they already know, like and trust.
   You and your cross-promotíon partner can each get access to the other person's "list" (the names of interested clients/customers collected at a website) and thus you've greatly expanded your potential client/customer pool.
7. With a Few Keystrokes You Can Announce New Updates of Your Activities
   Your updates on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn take seconds - and you've announced to your followers, friends and connections what you're doing or what you're offering or what you're speaking on. And there are even online applications that allow you to update your status across several of your social media accounts simultaneously. So it is as easy as 1-2-3 to keep in front of your potential clients/customers.
   In conclusion, once you become active yourself on social media platforms, you'll find many more reasons to promote your brand, book or business on social media in order to attract targeted potential clients/customers. And you'll look back at your pre-social media days and wonder how you ever did marketing without using online social media. 

About The Author
Phyllis Zimbler Miller has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School.

12 Ways to Use Twitter for Social Media Marketing

Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It involves writing Tweets, which are short updates of a maximum of 140 characters that tell your followers what you are up to. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question, "What are you doing?" Twitter has moved far beyond that. Tweets are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content, break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals. Here are 12 ways in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.

1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest

As soon as you read something online that you think is interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people. You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around that haven’t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not to mainstream media.

2. Building Your Network

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect with their network during events like conferences.

4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog. For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn't get old.

5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging conferences to fame. Live Tweeting events are great because they are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current discussions in your community.

6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicating with Your Team

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this regard if you have a virtual business with employees in different geographical locations. You can set your updates to private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using Twitter.

8. Brand Monitoring

Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter. If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make your site design even better.

9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites

If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission to try to score more votes from your followers. If your followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your content.

10. Hiring People

Looking for a programmer, designer, or writer? Whatever type of professional you seek, try finding them on Twitter. Simply send your followers a tweet telling them you are looking for someone for a job. They can either recommend someone to you or offer themselves for the job. Using Twitter in this way is ideal for finding qualified freelancers. It is much more convenient than putting out a classified ad.

11. Build Your Personal Brand

When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight, you make your followers feel like you are casual and approachable. Even those running a company that has a cold, corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.

12. Streamline Electronic Communications

When you use Twitter, you’re likely to find yourself using IM, email, and other electronic communication methods less. Twitter not only provides public chatting through Tweets, it also allows you to send direct messages. Twitter will help you streamline your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back online.