Building Your Social Media Connections

Social media websites are a phenomenon today. Websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and Blogger are some of the most accessed websites on the Internet. It, therefore, becomes important to leverage the widespread popularity of these websites and develop top social media strategies to expand your business.

The following are top social media strategies that can be considered:

• Objective – The objective of your social media campaign must be pretty clear right from the start. Branding, consumer awareness, reputation management, lead generation, sales, marketing, etc, are all activities very much achievable using Social Media Optimization (SMO); however, they require separate initiatives.
   
• Picking the right battles – There is no dearth of social media platforms available out there to begin your campaigns. Picking the right battle ie, selecting the websites, will hold the key to your success. You cannot be all over the Internet because constant engagements on every such forum would require a mammoth effort.
   
• Meaningful connects – Try spamming and the results will not be encouraging at all. In order to make the most out of your social media initiatives, consumers will have to relate to your business in some way or the other. Work toward building long lasting relationships with people in your network and the results will be rewarding in the long run.
   
• Web 2.0 – The term was first coined in the year 1999 by a consultant of information architecture. Today, it goes beyond the realm of only aesthetics and graphic design. Rich web 2.0 features, if included in your social media campaigns, will facilitate active information sharing and collaboration.
   
• Human analytics – There is a wide variety of tools available today to support and track social media initiatives. Their utility cannot be undermined. However, no tool will be able to analyze the emotional relationship between the brand and the consumer. Human intervention is required to correctly analyze trends, data and defining key strategies.
   
• Blogging – Start blogging about your business and create a genuine footfall of people wanting to seek information about your industry. Keep it information-driven and subtly introduce commercial elements to it such as customized signatures leading to your principal website (Calls-to-Action) at the end of every post.
   
• Trend Capture –Website analytics are often the most ignored aspect of a social media strategy. The amount of effort that you put in on various social media platforms can easily be analyzed using tools such as Google Analytics that provide statistics on website traffic.
   
• Encouraging Participation – Overdoing information dissemination can backfire and may not yield the desired results. The interaction has to be a 2-way process and you must encourage strong and sustained participation from your target audience to drive forward your objectives in an organic manner.
   
• Leveraging Full Features – Vertically extending the Facebook profile photograph of your business page to its maximum permissible size of 200 x 600 pix, customizing the twitter image background and actively participating in question/answers on LinkedIn.com are some of the most underutilized yet effective ways to catch the eye of your target audience.

Conclusion

Incorporating top social media strategies in your scheme of things has become a must, especially if you are responsible for the growth of a business. This is one of the most cost-effective ways to achieve a wide variety of business objectives and a must try. You must be extremely cautious with the way that you delegate this critical aspect to a third party. Doing due diligence about the strength of the company in executing social media strategies can go a long way to ensuring profitability for your business.

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