You’ve heard just how powerful social marketing can be.
With popular networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can instantly tap into your niche market, establish an online presence and start generating traffic to your websites quickly and easily.
In fact, you can skyrocket your income and maximize exposure to your products and services faster and easier than nearly any other form of marketing, and the best part of all, is that social marketing is absolutely free.
When it comes to generating new interest or exposure for your online business, social networks can help you quickly locate potential buyers, connect with potential joint venture partners in your niche, expand your outreach and even quickly evaluate and research potential markets by keeping a pulse on market trends and changes.
From community sites like Ning to information networks like Twitter, you will be able to generate new interest or exposure for your online business.
So without further delay, let’s begin!
Marketing With Ning
Ning, launched in 2005, and has been growing in popularity over the last two years.
As a Ning member, you can browse through thousands of social communities and join those that relate to your niche market, but better yet, you can create your very own social network based around your niche market!
You can customize your social network with a unique blend of design customizations and layout ideas, as well as add content, articles, link to external social sites and promote your blogs and websites all within the Ning community.
You can take things a step further by developing surveys, polls and allowing those who join your network to respond to profile questions, open conversations and threads.
If you develop your own social network within Ning, you will be given a unique URL that you can give to your customers, peers, and associates. Ning makes it very easy to connect with potential customers, generate sales leads, and find joint venture partners within your industry.
Setting up your own social community only takes a few minutes, but you’ll want to be sure to upload enough content to entice visitors to join your network.
Consider offering downloadable products such as ebooks or reports, to generate interest and motivate people to become part of your community.
You can also keep them coming back by broadcasting messages to them directly within Ning.
You can also enhance your network by adding in modules through a simple ‘drag & drop’ system, and best of all, users only require one login to access all of the social networks and communities they become a member of from within Ning. You can also embed Ning media players into your website as well!
Note: Your Ning community site will be quickly indexed in the major search engines as well so be sure to integrate relevant keywords into both your Ning profile as well as any content that you upload to your public page.
Sign Up: http://www.Ning.com
Marketing With Facebook
With Facebook, you can interact with those in your market by adding them as a contact, but you can also generate exposure a number of other ways from within the Facebook community:
1) Create Facebook Advertising Campaigns
Facebook offers its own internal advertising center where you can set up “Adwords style” advertisements that appear whenever specific keywords are entered within the Facebook community.
With Facebook advertising, you can pay per click (CPC) or impression (CPM), and can schedule your ads to run for a specific time or on an ongoing basis.
You can create your advertisement by visiting
http://www.Facebook.com/advertising
2) Create Facebook Pages (aka Fan Pages)
A “fan” page is similar to creating a new Facebook profile, where you can add notes, messages, download links, and images to your “fan” page, while managing your “fan” pages all directly from within your main Facebook account.
Sign Up: http://www.Facebook.com
Marketing With Twitter
Twitter is the leading social networking site online with millions of users connecting to their twitter accounts each day to post updates as well as browse through current status updates from those they’ve chosen to follow.
Twitter is an extremely powerful marketing tool, and with external resources including http://www.SocialOomph.com, you can automate your marketing campaigns by setting up greetings and welcome messages, as well as pre-loading updates that are scheduled to appear at specific times.
Each update (known as a “tweet”) posted to your twitter account will be seen by everyone who is on your following list, so it’s important that you spend time developing a polished Twitter account and generating a following base for maximum exposure.
Thankfully, it’s easy to grow a following with Twitter. You can begin by using Twitters internal search utility to browse through your email address book, from email providers like Yahoo Mail or Gmail.
You can then choose to follow everyone from your address book or if they currently aren’t using Twitter, you can invite them to join your following.
In order to maximize exposure, and build powerful marketing campaigns with Twitter, you will want to first become an active member and then begin ‘soft promoting’ to your following base.
Consider the types of tweets that you post. You want your updates to appeal to the majority of your market, so focus on quality content, entertaining updates, and links to viral videos, blogs, articles and other resources that your target audience will find useful.
The easiest way to drive traffic to your website or promote products and offers as well as affiliate products is by directing Twitter followers to your website where they can download a free tool or resource and then integrating your ads into the content itself.
For example, you could offer your twitter followers with a free report based around your niche market. Inside of your report, you could promote an affiliate product or even showcase your own!
Just keep in mind that you want to develop a relationship with those that have chosen to follow you, so begin by over-delivering on quality, relevant content, and once you’ve established a presence within the twitter community, start working towards a solid balance of free content and promotional based updates.
Sign Up: http://www.Twitter.com
Marketing With LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business oriented social community where you can invite people to become part of your network as well as locate relevant leads and business contacts by importing contacts from your email accounts and external social community lists.
LinkedIn has more than 20 million users, and continues to grow in popularity every day.
LinkedIn is a great way to build credibility in your niche market, as you can request that contacts ‘recommend you’, and in turn, your profile will receive more exposure throughout the community.
In addition, you can create a list of trusted connections that you can communicate with instantly, via LinkedIn’s on-site tools.
When creating your LinkedIn profile, you can include your employment history, interests, and websites as well as link to additional social networking accounts including Twitter.
With LinkedIn, you don’t have to update your profile manually. Instead, you simply enter in your personal or business information to create a basic profile, and then you can choose to update your current status by connecting your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile.
It’s easy to locate connections and begin to establish a LinkedIn account just by allowing LinkedIn to browse through your email address book to locate contacts that are already a part of the LinkedIn community.
Social Media Rockstar
Furthermore, each time you add a connection to your LinkedIn account, you will also be able to gain access to the people that they know! These connections are incredibly valuable as you can gain instant access to sales leads, as well as service providers and potential partners.
Just make sure to add your website URL’s into your LinkedIn profile, as well as provide a description as to your products and services so that those interested in your niche market and who preview your profile can instantly explore your offers.
You also want to integrate keywords into your LinkedIn profile. Choose words that clearly describe what your business is about, what your focus is and what you are offering.
The more targeted and relevant your keywords are, the easier it will be for potential contacts to find you.
Sign Up: http://www.Linkedin.com
Other Social Networking Websites:
Zorpia: http://www.Zorpia.com
Tagged http://www.Tagged.com
hi5 http://www.hi5.com
Fubar http://www.Fubar.com
Hub Pages: http://www.HubPages.com
MySpace: http://www.mySpace.com