As a business owner, you already know the importance of utilizing traditional PR — print, radio and TV exposure — to keep your name circulating in the marketplace. Now, however, there’s a new PR outlet you need to become familiar with. It’s called social media marketing (SMM), and when combined with your traditional PR efforts, it can help you penetrate the marketplace with your message more quickly and easily than ever before.
What is social media marketing? It’s utilizing the various social networking sites to enforce your brand and market your business. A social networking site is simply an online meeting place. Think of it like an eHarmony or Match.com for business people. On such sites, people can post profiles with the hopes of meeting other like-minded professionals for business reasons.
According to the Nielsen Research Group, social networks and blogs have moved ahead of personal e-mail among the most popular online activities people engage in. Additionally, USA Today reports that the time spent on these sites is growing three times faster than the overall Internet rate. More than two-thirds of the world’s online population now visits social networking and blogging sites.
Knowing this, it’s clear that if you haven’t yet engaged in SMM, the time to start is now. But before you do, you need to be aware of the top mistakes businesses make with this PR outlet so you can avoid them and get the biggest return for your marketing investment.
Mistake #1: Having more than one face on the Internet.
When you’re engaging in SMM, you’re really building your image from the ground up. The goal of SMM is to virally spread parts of your image across the Internet. The word “parts” is important. Basically, you’re starting with a holographic image of yourself in the virtual world. You then need to break that hologram apart and find the appropriate places on the Internet where you can frame certain pieces of it.
When someone looks at all the pieces on the various sites, they should be able to put them together to see a cohesive whole. They should not see multiple and varied images of who you are, as that would ruin your credibility. Therefore, if you have multiple Facebook accounts, for example, your personal one has to be hidden and by invitation only. You don’t want that other image out there confusing people and possibly diminishing your reputation.
Mistake #2: Collecting friends.
SMM is how you create instant buzz on the Internet by getting the same message out over and over. It’s spreading your message and getting yourself branded so you can get more business. Social networking, on the other hand, is about making friends. For example, you’ve likely seen someone on LinkedIn who has more than 25,000 contacts. That’s great, but what do you do with all those contacts? Remember, just because you have a phone book in your office doesn’t mean you can open the book at random, pick a name and call them for business.
