Top 5 Social Media Strategies in 2012

This is a guest post by Jasmine.

It is needless to say how many people have Facebook accounts, how often they check the page each day and how many friends each of them have on average. You’re most likely to know all these by now as you probably have an account too. And of course, it isn’t just Facebook being all the rage. There is Twitter, Google+, blogs and even LinkedIn. No, LinkedIn is not just for getting professional contacts. LinkedIn also serves as a great marketing tool now that it allows status updates just like how Facebook and Twitter do.

So while you might have a blog and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, maybe even all four, does your business have one too? If it doesn’t, why not create one and spend your time promoting your products or services online instead of checking people’s updates and admiring their photos? The first step is setting up an account for each of those, then these are what you should do next once you have taken the first step:

1. Facebook

You might be a pro at Facebook but maintaining a fan page is slightly different from a profile page. You get ‘fans’ instead of ‘friends’ and you can’t add fans but instead wait until they click ‘like’ on your page. However, the similarity is that you can have a custom URL (eg. http://www.facebook.com/mycompanyname) but the only ‘rule’ is that you can do so only after you have 25 fans. Getting 25 people to like your page isn’t difficult, unless you really have no contacts at all!

Then, do the same just as how you would on your profile page. Share updates, post photos and highlight interesting news items. Just remember that these statuses should be about your company and its offerings, not about your holidays or the bad day you had at work. Every now and then, make use of Facebook’s analytics to find out who has been visiting your site.

2. Twitter

Join the millions of Twitterers who keep the world abuzz with updates of 140 characters long. However, try to keep your tweets shorter than that just in case a fan would like to retweet your words and add some comments to it. Just like Facebook, there are tools which you can use to monitor traffic. Twitter is also probably more interactive than Facebook in the sense that you can prompt a conversation by placing a # before a keyword and you can follow someone without them having to approve a request for you to do so.

3. LinkedIn

With 120 million people on LinkedIn already, the site is strong enough to garner attention as much as Facebook and Twitter. Promoting your company here, especially if it’s an SME, is a great idea simply because there are so any professionals here. Build a network of similar interest and work your way up from there. You can request ‘recommendations’ from your contacts, start a group discussion and synchronize your LinkedIn page with your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

4. Google+

Google+ didn’t turn out as successful as they had wanted it to but just everyone in the world would have a Gmail account, so it is inevitable that they would miss the Google+ button. Works the same way like Facebook, it allows the sharing of words, photos and videos.

While you are on Google+, you can also video chat with your friends, colleague and family members with Hangouts, an online video chat feature. It is integrated with other Google's tools, allowing you to chat while working together on Google Docs or even share your screen with them to troubleshoot a problem.

5. Blogs

Blogging was the main platform for sharing thoughts and media before Friendster, MySpace and Facebook were born. However, blogging did not die and many blogs are maintained to this day despite the owners having various social network accounts. Blogs are actually the best platform for online marketing. Use your blog to post articles that contain keywords, leave comments on other blogs, link up other blogs and allow sharing on social networks by placing social media buttons for each post. WordPress and Blogger are two of the most popular blogging platforms which are free, user-friendly and easy to set up.

After setting up accounts and building networks, don’t forget that the key is to keep your pages updated. Without having fresh contents, your fans will get bored and think that your business has probably gone bust. The best frequency to update is once every three days, so make a schedule, keep to it and see your business make its presence known in no time.

About the author
Jasmine specializes in web design, web hosting and everything about WordPress. She shares her web hosting experiences on 100Webhosting.com – a very popular web hosting review website. Oh, this month, she highly recommends WebhostingHub.