I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, social media can be an extremely powerful marketing tool if used correctly. If you don’t use it correctly, you can really do some serious harm to your brand, your products and your company.

Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube are most frequently used for discussions, and interacting with other people. If you go onto any of those sites with the attitude that you can talk at other users instead of with them, you’re going to give those other users a negative opinion of you right off the bat. If you continue to do nothing but post links to your own site, and you ignore other users completely, you will gain a reputation as a spammer. Once you have earned that reputation it’ll be hard to shake.

If someone’s first experience with your brand is being spammed by you on Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube, you can bet that will stick with them. Going forward, anytime they see your logo, or hear your company’s name, they’ll remember being spammed by you, and that’s the story they’ll tell their friends when the topic comes up. A negative reputation on social media sites can and will spread in that manner. If you put enough people off by spamming them, you can do some serious damage to your brand.

In order to avoid that fate,  you have to use social media the right way. Be sure to interact with other users in a meaningful way. Answer their questions, ask them questions, and be sure to talk about things other than your own website and your own products. It’s also a good idea to avoid automating your social media accounts. If each post you make on one of these sites seems generic, and automated, other users will eventually catch on to that, and stop paying attention to you. The fallout won’t be as bad as if you’re spamming other users, but you won’t be getting any positive attention either.

Social media can be extremely useful to just about any company. It can also be extremely dangerous if you don’t know how to use it. Be sure to interact with other users, and you’ll do fine. If you are having trouble figuring it all out, consider hiring a social media manager. You might save yourself a lot of time, effort, and trouble.

There are two different ways to use Facebook as a marketing tool, and each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. You can choose to either put ads on Facebook, or you can create a Facebook fan page for your company, or your products, and handle promoting it yourself. The real question is which one is right for you?

Ads

Facebook ads are a great way to bring targeted traffic to a site. Facebook gives you all the tools you need to ensure your ads will be served to the demographic you’re trying to reach. Depending on what market you’re reaching out to, the ads can be a little pricey, but the results are immediate. Put up a few Facebook ads, and you’ll see an instant return in the form of incoming traffic. If you don’t have the time to run a social media campaign that might take some time to build up, you might want to spend the money on Facebook ads. You’ll get your ad out to the users you want seeing it quickly.

Fan Page

If your budget is tight, you might want to consider launching a Facebook fan page, and promoting it yourself. It’s completely free to set up a fan page, and it’s also a great way to interact with your users. Fan pages allow you to add a discussion tab where users can start conversations with one another. The more conversations your fan page has, the more repeat traffic it will get. People will keep coming back in order to see h ow the discussions are progressing over time. You can also include information about any upcoming events you might be throwing for your company, or your products. By including an events tab on your fan page, you can gauge interest in your events, draw attention to them, and get an idea of what the turn out will be like.

Ultimately, the method you choose comes down to how much time and money you have to invest in Facebook. You could combine the two methods, and use Facebook ads to promote your new fan page. No matter what kind of business you run, chances are your target audience uses Facebook, so it’s a good idea to pick one of these methods to promote your company. In the end, the return will be worth the investment.

If you’re involved with social media marketing, you are probably familiar with Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube as marketing tools, but what you might not realize is that Flickr can actually help you bring in some additional revenue. Whether you are a full fledged photographer, or just an internet marketer familiar with affiliate programs, you can use Flickr to your advantage.

Affiliate Marketing

Take a picture of a product you’re pushing through an affiliate program, and put it on your Flickr account. Put an affiliate link to the product right in the notes. Each time someone clicks on your affiliate link, you’ll earn a commission if they buy the product you pictured. This method is great if you can take your own pictures of the products you’re talking about rather than just using stock photography.

Advertise Your Site

Whenever you post an image to your Flickr account that’s relevant to your website, be sure to put a link to your site in the notes. If the pictures you’re posting to Flickr are interesting, your Flickr visitors will be likely to click on the link to your site to see what other content you have to offer.

Sell Photography

There are a number of ways to make money through Flickr if you’re a talented photographer with decent equipment. First, consider selling your images as stock photography. You set a fee for the use of your image, and anyone looking to add that image to their website can buy it, and use it as they see fit. You can also sell prints of your work. If you upload a hi resolution photograph to Flickr, you can sell prints of it in various sizes. Of course, you can always just promote your photography services through your Flickr account. Show off some of your best work on it, and put a link to your site in the notes for each picture .

It may not be as widely used as Facebook, or as directly interactive as Twitter, but if you use Flickr the right way, you can bring in some money with it. Keep these tips in mind as your setting up your Flickr account, and you’ll be bringing in more money before you know it.

SEO can be extremely complicated. Every site is different, and as such, every SEO strategy is going to be a little different. There’s no solution that’s perfect for everyone, but there are a few tips that can apply to just about any site on the internet.

Use Your Code

There are a lot of places in your site’s code where you can make changes to improve SEO. The title tag dictates what’s displayed at the top of a browser for each page you visit, and it’s also one of the first things about a page that search engines index. Give your site a good, accurate, keyword rich title whenever possible, and you’ll be off to a great start. Next, fill out your meta tags. There’s actually a meta tag dedicated specifically to keywords. Fill that one out, but don’t overdo it. Stick to less than 50 keywords, or you run the risk of search engines suspecting you of keyword spam.

Keyword Rich Content

Whenever possible, use keywords in your content. For example, if your site is about carpet cleaners, be sure to use words and phrases related to carpet cleaners whenever possible. If you can exchange a pronoun for the name of a carpet cleaner without breaking the sentence then do it. You don’t want to go overboard with keywords in your content. If search engines flag you as a keyword spammer, your site will get removed from search results all together, or at the very least, moved way down the list.

Quality Content

Your content needs to reflect your site’s topic well without using keyword spam in any way. It also has to be original. If the same exact piece of content appears on multiple websites, search engines will penalize those sites, and lower their search rank. Original high quality content is one of the most important elements in an SEO friendly website.

Images

Give all of your images descriptive names, and be sure to fill out the alt tags in the code. Image searches can yield a surprising amount of traffic, and a lot of people don’t bother SEO optimizing their images. Good image optimization can be extremely helpful for your site.

An SEO friendly site is a high traffic site.

If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you already know a lot about how to use social media effectively as a marketing tool. What you might not be as clear on is why you should bother. There are a lot of great reasons to use social media marketing as part of your online marketing strategy.

Low Cost

It doesn’t cost a penny to set up an account on a social media site. You can have a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, and a Youtube account up and running without spending a dime. If you really want to, you can actually buy ad space on most social media sites, but it’s just not worth the expense when you can create an account with them for free that can be just as effective as an add if you’re willing to put some effort into it.

It Doesn’t Take Much Time

The initial set up for a social media account can sometimes take a little while, but once you’re done with that part, you won’t have to spend a lot of time with your social media accounts to have them be successful. If you spend fifteen minutes here and there throughout your day updating your social media accounts,  they will be successful. There’s one exception: Youtube. If you’re going to have a successful Youtube channel, you’re going to have to spend some time creating and editing your videos. Chances are, depending on your audience, the yield will be worth the effort, but make no mistake, you’re going to have to put in some effort.

Feedback

Once you have a strong presence built up on a social media site, you’ll find that it’s a great source of feedback about your product, or your company. You’ll receive a lot of unsolicited feedback, both positive and negative. If feedback is unprompted in any way, you can be reasonably certain that it’s honest. If you get a lot of criticism about a particular product or feature of a product, you know there’s room for improvement. If you get a lot of praise for something, try to figure out how to expand on it. Your customers will let you know what they want, all you have to do is listen, and act accordingly.

There are a lot of great reasons to use social media marketing, and these are just a few examples. It doesn’t take a lot of money or time, and you can learn a lot from it – what more could you ask for?

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have a lot of uses for your business. You probably already know that you can use them to get your message out to your audience, but you can also use them to get feedback about your products from your customers.

The most obvious way you can get feedback about your products through social networking sites is by direct input from your customers. Often times they’ll send you completely unsolicited feedback about your products through social networks, which is great. Unsolicited feedback tends to be the best kind of feedback. It’s honest, and it isn’t forced. The customer cares about the product, and has a strong opinion about some aspect of it that they want to share with you. If they’re sharing a negative opinion, it’s something they’d like to see fixed. If they’re sharing a positive opinion, it’s something they see as a strength of your product. If you see a lot of unsolicited complaints about some aspect of your product, it’s something you might want to consider working on or changing. If you get a lot of unsolicited positive feedback about an aspect of your product, consider it a strength, and see if you can expand on it in any way.

You can also get feedback through Twitter and Facebook by asking for it. Make a few posts asking your customers what they think of one of your products, or a particular feature of one of your products. You’ll very likely get a lot of solid responses. On social networking sites, people like to interact with other people, and companies. If you give them the chance to provide feedback about a product they care about, they’ll almost certainly do so.

Another way you can use social networks to get feedback is by searching them for your company name, or product name. Chances are you’ll get a great many results on either Twitter, or Facebook, and those results will help you to determine the overall attitude people hold toward your product. or company. Twitter even allows you to save searches for later use. Your saved searches will show up right on the sidebar for one click access to the search results.

Social networks like Facebook, and Twitter can be valuable sources of feedback about your product or your company if you know how to use them. Reach out to your users, and set up a few searches that you check regularly, and you will get a lot of information about what people think of you and your products.

Yesterday, I showed you some of the most common mistakes people make when they’re trying to use Twitter as a marketing tool. Today, let’s take a look at the right things to do with a Twitter account.

See What People Are Saying

By using saved searches, you can keep track of what people are saying about your company, your products, or your niche in general. Once a day skim through your saved searches, and see what people are talking about. That way, you can adjust not just your Twitter marketing strategy, but your entire marketing campaign.

Share information

Send useful links and information out to your followers whenever possible. Hey, if you throw some of your own links in, you might get some more traffic out of the deal. Just be sure to share things from other sites too. If you come off as doing nothing but shilling your own site, other Twitter users won’t trust you, or the links you send out.

Learn

Look at your Twitter feed. Don’t just glance at it, really look at it, and see what people are talking about, and what they’re sharing with each other. You might be surprised at how much useful information you’ll find in your Twitter feed. If the people you’re following share your interests, they will probably share links to sites and services that will appeal to you.

Sell Yourself In Moderation

You can use Twitter to push your products or services, but it’s important that you do other things with it too. Take the time to talk to other users. Be sure to share links to sites other than your own, and talk about useful information your followers are likely to care about. If you’re doing all of that, and you slip the occasional link to your products or services in, you will find that people are far more receptive to them.

Twitter can be extremely useful, but only if you know what to do with it. Use your Twitter account as a source of information, and as a way to share ideas with your followers. Use it to sell yourself in moderation, and be sure to socialize with other users. If you use Twitter the right way, it will help you evolve your marketing strategy, and grow your business.

Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool, but only if you know what to do with it. There are a few common mistakes that people make when trying to capitalize on Twitter. Any one of these mistakes can spell disaster for your Twitter marketing efforts, so be careful to avoid them.

Spamming

Alright, you might not feel like you’re spamming, but if you’re sending out the exact same message over and over again, Twitter, and most of it’s users will consider you a spammer. it’s OK to send out links to your site, but do so in moderation. Also, try to create a different message to go with your link each time you send it out. It’s also important to post things other than your link. The bulk of your Twitter feed should be content that has nothing to do with your website. That may sound counterproductive, but in reality, if you’re giving your followers interesting things to read, they’ll be more likely to click on a link to your site whenever you do post one.

The Hard Sell

If you have a Twitter account, you have probably run into the hard sell a few times already. Someone will automatically @reply you if you mention anything related to their niche . Usually their reply will just be a generic sales pitch. This might sound like a good idea – after all, you’re getting your message out to people who are talking about your niche, but in actuality, your  sales pitch is going to be received poorly. If you’re using an automated service, you might also get flagged as spam by Twitter eventually.

The Hands-Off Approach

If you really want to, you can automate just about every aspect of your Twitter account. There is software to automatically follow people, post tweets, and send out DM’s. If you’re automating everything, you’re missing the most important element in a successful Twitter account – social interaction. For your account to be a success, you have to talk to other users and share real information and ideas with them. You just can’t do that with a fully automated account.

If you let yourself fall into any of these mistakes, you’ll ruin your Twitter account permanently. If your account is perceived as spam, or as just an advertisement by other users, it will get overlooked completely. Instead, take a hands-on approach to Twitter, and strike up meaningful conversations with other users. You’ll see positive results very quickly.

A lot of people have some really wrong ideas about how to use social media, and what it can and can’t do for them and their business. Let’s take a minute and clear up some of the confusion.

Social Media Takes Too Much Time

A lot of people have it in their head that you have to spend a  lot of time each day with social media sites in order to use them as an effective marketing tool. That’s actually not true at all. You can spend between 30 minutes and an hour every day on social media, and have a strong social marketing campaign. Break that time up into fifteen minute blocks, and spread them out throughout the day, and you’ll barely notice the time you’re spending to have an effective social media marketing campaign.

My Customers Don’t Use Social Media

Facebook alone has over 500 million users. Chances are, whatever demographic you’re trying to reach out to, it’s represented on Facebook, and other social media sites.

Social Media Won’t Effect My Sales

There’s a good chance that more of your demographic knows about Facebook than your site. By having a presence on Facebook, and other social media sites, you are giving your customers new ways to find your business. The more people you reach out to, the more people you can sell to. It’s that simple.

I Can’t Measure The Impact Social Media Is Having On My Business

Yes, you can. Google Analytics, and other stat tracking software allows you to track visitors to your website . Stat tracking software will show you what site they came in from, and everything they did while they were on your site. That means you can learn exactly what your visitors that came from social media sites did while they were on your site.

Social Media Is A Fad

Social media is actually a trend, not a fad. Fads pop up quickly, and burn out in a short amount of time. Trends are more of a long term indication of the general direction popular culture is taking. Social media sites have been around, and popular for a long enough time that they have become a significant part of pop culture. In other words, for the foreseeable future, social media is here to stay.

Hopefully this clears up some of your social media misconceptions. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube can be powerful marketing tools that require a minimal investment of time and money. Don’t believe any rumors you hear that contradict that.

It can be tough to figure out who to follow on Twitter. If you follow too many people, you might have a hard time keeping up with the people you actually want to have a conversation with. If you don’t follow enough people, you might not get enough followers. That’s why it’s important to follow the right people. There are a few guidelines you can keep in mind that will help you to decide who to follow.

Popularity

When trying to decide whether or not to follow someone, look at how many followers they have. and how many people they’re following. If the number of followers they have significantly outweighs the number of people they’re following, chances are they’re reasonably popular. Striking up a conversation with a popular Twitter user can be good for your follower count, so it’s a good idea to follow popular users.

What’s Their Niche?

If a Twitter user is popular, the next thing to look at is what audience they’re talking to. If they’re talking to your niche, you should definitely be following them. In fact, following a popular Twitter user in your niche can help you to evolve your marketing strategy, and not just your Twitter account. If a Twitter user is popular in your niche, chances are they’re talking about things your audience cares about. Paying attention to what they’re saying is a great way to get an idea of what topics your audience is interested in.

If All Else Fails, Use Software

There are a number of apps, both free and paid, available to help you decide which Twitter users to follow. These apps will make suggestions to you based on the user’s following count, followers, frequently used words, and frequency of @replies. These apps usually make strong suggestions, but it’s still a good idea to double check the suggestions manually, just to be safe.

Once you’re following the right people on Twitter, it’s time to make the most of it. Treat Twitter like a party – don’t just stand in the corner enjoying the punch, get out there and strike up some conversations. Send @replies to the people you’re following. Ask and answer any questions you can, and be sure to answer any @replies you get. If you are social with other Twitter users, your Twitter account will work in your favor before you know it.