Social Media Alone is NOT Enough

Even though Social Media is HUGE across the entire Internet, it is not the end all to doing business online.  It’s like saying the only mall to go to is the mall of America’s because it’s SO big, but needless to say you could go to hundreds of other malls across the country and connect with people you would never see at one of the biggest malls.

There is another problem with depending on Social Media as your sole point of connection with customers, believe it or not there is still a very large number of people that just aren’t in to it yet.  How will you connect with them?

I know, there is always a portion of the world you just never will touch.  But knowing that Social Media has limitations should alert you to broaden your strategy to include Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization strategies.  Together your site can be pretty much unbeatable, I’m not going to lie to you it is a LOT of work and creativity.  Let’s look at some elements you could add easily to start expanding past one source of connection online.

Start a blog, like the one your reading, you can see there is a ton of useful information here and it’s popularity just keeps increasing because of it.  So what can you talk about on a blog that would help educate your customers / visitors and start building a connection?  Do you have colleagues in the field that would be willing to blog along side you to help build content and diversify the point of view provided?

NOTE:  Don’t be afraid to teach people about your product or service, sure some will be able to do it themselves from your writings.  But most will just keep coming back for more and eventually buy from you, and THAT is what your in business for. 

Start Article Marketing, write longer (500+ words) about how your products or services are impacting lives and/or businesses.  Write about a problem and provide the solution without a sales pitch, this is the number one converter for one of my clients.  After a visitor has found the article on a different website they have come to see you as an expert and WANTS to visit your website.  They enter the site far more likely to purchase or call than a random visitor.

I suggest using isnare.com to distribute your articles or use ezinearticles.com.  Read the guidelines and understand how they work, I use them both with great results.

Having added the two above tactics to your arsenol it’s time to integrate them in to your Social Media strategy, every time you post a blog entry or article make sure your Social Media group see’s it.  They will begin to look forward to the updates and share them to their base of friends and followers.  Again, imagine after a while getting new customers daily without having to make calls or knock on doors.

Tags: Internet marketing, search engine optimization, Social Media, social media marketing

This entry was posted on January 12, 2010 at 8:02 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.