Succeed With Social Media
This is my entry for Eban Pagan’s how-to-use social-media contest. Even though I’ve covered social media within the year, I think this nice succinct summary stands well as a Frugal Marketing Tip–and is maybe easier to deal with than the four-part series I ran last spring.
Besides, repurposing content is a great marketing strategy, so you get to see me put that into action too. 🙂
The key to success with social media–and I’ve built my business on it since 1995–is to interact with others the way you’d like to be interacted with. Call it the Golden Rule of Cyberspace–it’s not so different from the Golden Rule of every major religion.
This means…
* Provide lots of helpful and useful information, especially if you expect to ask questions
* Say thank-you when people help you (but DON’T fill your public profiles with endless thank-you notes, especially on Twitter)
* Look for opportunities to connect others who should know each other, even if you don’t directly benefit
* Remember that it’s a conversation, not an e-blast
* Pitch subtly and relevantly (is that a word? It is now)
* It’s about relationships, not about numbers
As for which social media to participate on… Four musts would be Twitter, Facebook, your own blog, and (gasp! how retro!) Yahoogroups. Yeah, Yahoogroups lacks all the interface niceties of Facebook, Plaxo, etc., but it has hundreds of thousands of tightly niched communities, and I’m living proof that it’s quite possible to market there.
For myself, I also have benefited from participating on CollectiveX, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Ning–mostly by joining groups.
I have been using social media marketing for over a decade, and writing about it all the way back to 1991. Most of my books cover the basic concepts, and I recently completed an e-book specifically covering the Web 2.0 sites–which I throw in as a bonus with either of my Grassroots Marketing books. And relationship marketing can exist outside of social media, or even the Web–I write about that in detail in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.
Shel Horowitz, marketing strategist and copywriter
https://www.frugalmarketing.com
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Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Newsletters » Blog Archive » Frugal Marketing Tip, January 2009 said,
Wrote on January 7, 2009 @ 12:38 pm
[…] Frugal Marketing Tip of the Month: Succeed with Social Media This is my entry for Eban Pagan’s how-to-use social-media contest. Even though I’ve covered […]
Michelle Shaeffer said,
Wrote on January 7, 2009 @ 9:18 pm
Great tips, thank you!
planbservices (Michael Berger) said,
Wrote on January 7, 2009 @ 11:42 pm
Succeed with social media: https://tinyurl.com/8cpgxj
Eric Roth said,
Wrote on January 9, 2009 @ 1:01 am
Solid, practical tips.
While I lack your experience and your success, I have found using Gather.com a satisfying and valuable place to share ideas and make connections too. LinkedIn and Facebook seem better suited, at least for English teachers, than Plaxo and MySpace. Finally, the narrow niche social websites organized by profession seem like they could be promising, but so far I have not found it worthwhile to invest too much time on those sites.