Best Practices for Social Media Marketing

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Social media marketing has taken on an almost mysterious aura, as if you need special wizard powers or ninja skills to make it work for your business.

Allow me to take away the mystery for you and give you the secret to social media marketing: it’s just marketing, but with a social amplification component.

What do I mean by that, and what has that got to do with landing pages? Well read on….

Marketing is marketing, even in the social media world

With social media, as with any type of marketing, you have two kinds of marketing: branding and lead generation.

Branding is traditionally associated with large image ads on billboards and during the Super Bowl.

Lead generation is normally associated with direct mail, email marketing, telemarketing, trade shows, seminars, webinars, search engine marketing, or anything aimed at directly bringing prospects into your sales funnel.

With social media it’s no different.

As Conversion Scientist Brian Massey states, conversation-oriented social media marketing (short status updates, pokes, photo sharing, comments) is for branding, or sometimes customer service, and helps to increase your follows or fans on social media.

Content-oriented social media marketing is the specific use of topic-specific content to educate or entertain prospects on social media so as to bring them back to your traditional landing pages to convert them into prospects.

You need a landing page for your content-oriented social media marketing

After you’ve enticed your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn connections or members of your Google + circles to read your content, you need to bring them to a landing page.

A blog post or video page may be your landing page.

Or you might build a specific landing page to present an offer, such as prompting your fans to download a free eBook, or sign-up for a newsletter (see previous posts on B2B Lead Generation or Ecommerce Landing Pages).

Also, make sure you track your social media marketing with a tracking device

To really become a savvy social media marketer, though, you’ve got to determine which social media site generates more leads for your company. You do this by tracking.

Massey mentions a wireless tracking device, which in our case is a specific tracking URL, preferably bit.ly.

And don’t forget the social amplification aspect

The power in social media is not the ‘media,’ but the ‘social.’ Target high-profile users of your product or service, get them to use your product, form a positive opinion of you, thentalk about you on your social channels.

Once you’re able to leverage the ‘social proof’ aspects of social media by leveraging positive comments about your product or service from high-profile users, you want to bring your prospects back to your traditional landing page.

Conclusion

Social Media Marketing is just marketing – with social amplification. Use your social media channels to spread valuable content, leverage happy users of your product, and get people off of your social channels and into your sales funnel.

And have a landing page to provide the warm, comfortable welcome your prospects need from your company!