Intro to Social Media Marketing - Part 1

Social media marketing can certainly help grow a small business, but remember what Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and all the other social media sites were originally created to accomplish.

The less socially appealing your product or service, the harder it will be to develop a following on any of these sites. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. BlendTec, a blender manufacturer, created fun videos that went viral on YouTube, causing a massive spike in sales.

Social media marketing is another form of what is termed "Web 2.0." The idea is simple. You get other people excited and interested in your content and hope they tell their friends, and that those friends tell their friends, and so on.

Sounds good, right? In practice, things aren't quite so easy.

The Main Challenges With Social Media Marketing

Here are the main issue and challenges regarding social media.

Social media was designed for fun social discussions, not for marketing your real estate business.
The search engines have toughened their standards when it comes to social sites. Successfully marketing your products and services is a lot more time-consuming than it used to be.
The search engines are aware that social sites aren't in existence just to give business owners an easy collection of links back to corporate websites. Most search engines (e.g., Google) devalue links coming from your various social profile pages.
There is a lot of marketing noise on all the social sites. Trying to market your products may be seen as spam - even if it is a legitimate marketing effort.
Many social sites no longer follow links. That is, they no longer pass their PageRank to external web pages. Therefore, any strategy to use social media sites to increase the number of incoming links to your site will mostly be a waste of your time.
Social media traffic is difficult to monetize. If I look at the statistics of my own social traffic, I see majority of these people are leaving in 10-15 seconds, only viewing a single page, and almost never purchasing anything. You'll find other people out there saying the same thing.

Is There Any Value to Social Networking for Small Businesses?

After reading the above, one might wonder if there is any value at all to promoting your small business via social media. The answer is 'yes', but think of your social networking efforts more as a spice that completes a great dish.

Generating viable sales leads via social media requires a sizeable amount of time. For most small business owners, that time is much better spent in other core marketing areas.

One very viable social media strategy is to create great high-quality website content and get your visitors to do all of your social media marketing for you.

How do you do that?

That's the topic in Part 2 of this series, Social Media Tips for Your Website.