Shrill – Social Media Marketing for the Rest of Us

So, you really want to get started with Social Media. You’ve decided that you can no longer afford to not be there. Yet, you don’t have a lot of time to devote to exploring the vast landscape of Social Media platforms and sites and you definitely can’t afford to hire a specialist or a good Virtual Assistant to do the job, or you don’t have the time and means to train anybody on the peculiarities of your business so that they can effectively represent your company over the Internet.

You are thinking maybe of something you can do and administer yourself in your spare time, or have your secretary or someone in marketing do, just so you will not be completely absent. Is it possible?

Well, in my experience,  yes and no.  Of course it is better to be out there somehow,  than not  at all.

However, success in Social Media is directly proportional to the amount of effort you put into it. Except in the rare cases when some content suddenly goes viral, the ones who succeed in Social Media marketing spend a great deal or time (and money) doing it.

So is there hope for you? To some extent there is. You can pick and stick with one or two of the suggestions I am listing below and follow through. It is actually better if you focus on one or two than if you try to spread your campaign and is unable to keep it up.

Keep in mind that the very essence of Social Media is content. It is all about creating and sharing content, then talking about it, generating discussions, buzz. Social Media is a gigantic cocktail party. You better not start a conversation if you have nothing to talk about, or no time to properly address your audience and peers.

That said, here are my picks for this particular moment in time:  (Social Media changes quickly. Places that are hot now, are bound to be abandoned as soon as something better happens.)

• Facebook profiles for owners and/or marketing/PR/customer service employee, and a Facebook fan page for the company (This is very important: profiles are for people, fan pages are for entities and companies. Facebook users frown upon user profiles with pure company information on them). For more on using Facebook for Business, reffer to this pretty cool webinar from Hubspot
• LinkedIn profile for all the key employees, LinkedIn business profile,  and a LinkedIn company group
• Twitter accounts for interested employees and company.
• An in-site blog or news page with a consistent flow of new content to be promoted on the above media (otherwise you will run out of stuff to talk about defeating the purpose of being involved in it)
• Optimized and consistently updated  profiles on Merchant Circle and Insider Pages.
• Listings on Yahoo Local and Google Local
• YouTube account.

Please stay tuned as my next posts will walk you through each one of these platforms and help you get the most out them.