Are you ready to improve your marketing, connect with new prospective customers and build a loyal following? Of course you are. The real question is how to do it economically.  Sit up and pay attention class, as we explore Social Media Marketing 101.

First of all, don’t get rattled by the various types of social media. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have one thing in common: they’re all about helping you connect to people. Forget that you’re a company or that you sell anything. Social marketing is about one thing and one thing only: building relationships.

Now, most likely you’re already familiar with these services on a personal level, but when it comes to business applications, something is holding you back. Maybe you’ve been reluctant to jump in to use them as promotional tools because you find them just a little intimidating and confusing. That’s where I come in. Here’s how each of these tools can be used to get solid results.

Tweeting Your Success

Twitter is a great for quit hits. It’s the medium for broadcasting short messages to a broad range of people. It’s limited to 140 characters and the audience for a small business is generally a mix of both personal and professional connections. The system of hashtags allows for quick sharing of common ideas and builds a social experience into almost any subject.

What Twitter is great for: Business messages such as new hires, promoting short-term sales (such as menu items at a restaurant or one day sales) and responding to customer service issues.

There are lots of Twitter mistakes but they’re easy to avoid with a little common sense.

Build Your Fan base and Your Business

If you want something a little more interactive, Facebook is the way to go. For some businesses, it might actually serve as the entire web presence. In Facebook, you create custom pages tailored to your specific needs. Another benefit? Your clients and customers become Fans (what Facebook calls a subscriber) and will share their love of your product or service with all of their own Facebook friends.

With a simple mouse click the terrific business page feature allows visitors to your site to sign-up for your newsletter, without the fear of giving your company too much access to personal information. Customers receive updates on products and services, while you get to promote yourself to both the first customer and his or her circle of friends.

What Facebook is great for: Facebook is far more people focused than Twitter, so it’s a great way to announce personal connections and interact with customers in a public one-on-one environment. If you’re a business that runs contests, giveaways or special regional promotions, Facebook will help you target your message to specific market groups.

Let People Linkin With Your Business

LinkedIn is sometimes described as a professional version of Facebook and it’s growing strong with a recent IPO that doubled its value in a short stretch. Where Facebook connects consumers to your brands, LinkedIn connects your lateral markets to your business personality. It’s about connecting sales managers with purchasing department heads, building a network of CEOs and getting to know the people side of your market.

I like to think of LinkedIn as an online resumé. It helps me see the careers and specialties of my connections. That way, when I need to hire a consultant I can look at the people I already know before looking elsewhere.

What LinkedIn is great for: Building a comprehensive understanding of your stakeholders and developing professional relationships with your business contacts.

Blogging is Social

Building an online blog (short for weblog) is another common form of social marketing albeit often forgotten when talked about as a form of social marketing. A web blog is about communicating from a fixed domain name such as thisismyurl.com using WordPress or a similar blogging package. It’s about writing content for your readers, sharing knowledge and helping people solve problems through articles.

When I think about what a blog is, I like to describe it as an old-fashioned newsletter or a magazine just for your business. It easily connects to the other social platforms but brings people together from the other social websites to read longer pieces in a central location.

What blogging is great for: Blogging is about building your website as a brand and giving people a place to read about your product or service as a central repository. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, search engines index blog posts as regular website content and drive organic traffic to your website via search results.

(still, why is it worth the extra time it will take to write the blog? Does it allow for the flavour of my business personality to come through? And if so, why is this important?

Take Away

I hope this has helped you learn about the four key tools in social media. Each has a strength, which will help build your business as well as your personal brand. Remember, building your online presence is about interacting with your clients, building a web of contacts and helping them realize how your services can help them. Class dismissed!

(Feature photo by Darren Hester)