This is post six in a series of posts on Inbound Marketing, focusing on social media marketing and developing your social media outposts to help attract your target audience and build brand recognition for your small business.

Inbound Marketing - Social Media Pillar

Social media has evolved into a key marketing channel for small businesses wanting to gain visibility, drive traffic to your website and generate new leads. The next step in your inbound marketing effort is to:

• Identify which social networking sites will work best for your business, and
• Create optimized social media outposts to ensure your brand can be found.

Understanding which social networking sites are right for your business and how to take advantage of them to generate leads is usually a challenge for many small businesses. There are too many social networking sites to choose from to cover them all. It is far better to do a great job on a few relevant platforms than spread yourself too thin across too many.

Determine which social networking sites are the best for your business by choosing those that provide the most direct access to your target audience and the most value for your particular business. In addition, your social media marketing strategy includes not only the where you will engage with your audience but also what you will do to provide value on each social network.

The best way to illustrate successful social media marketing is to use a couple of examples:

• A restaurant may choose a Facebook Page and Twitter as a starting point. The Facebook Page for a local business with a physical address becomes a Facebook Places Page allowing customers to check in and post reviews. The establishment can interact with their customers with fun posts on food, asking questions and getting customers to participate in the discussion. The restaurant may promote daily specials, new entrees or other items of interest to both Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Once Facebook and Twitter gain momentum, the restaurant can now claim its business listing on Yelp, UrbanSpoon, Google Places and other local directories where people may search for restaurants. These sites also make it easy for customers to provide reviews. Finally, once you have a established these outposts, explore adding Gowalla or Foursquare for location based marketing and Groupon or Living Social to offer the occasional deal to attract new clientele.
• Social media marketing for a service business will be one that focuses on providing useful content to build your expert reputation. The blog is the critical social media hub where you provide original content that is of interest to your target audience. Twitter and LinkedIn accounts plus a Facebook Page will help you build related but different networks where you can share useful information, engage in conversations and follow what is happening in your industry more effectively. Depending on your business, a YouTube channel may be a benefit for adding multimedia content. Unlike the interaction the restaurant is trying to get from their customers, the service business is looking to primarily educate and inform, thereby building trust with their followers. Before you start posting, however, review each platform for the unique needs of each of your audiences.

Why create and optimize your social media outposts?

When you create your presence on relevant social networking sites and optimize them for your major keywords, you:

• Increase your business’s web footprint, helping people find you more easily.
• Reach more people with your content, increasing your reputation as an expert.
• Establish a more consistent brand with more visibility, increasing brand recognition.

As part of your inbound marketing strategy, your social media outposts such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn create important communities that encourage conversations and build trust for your brand. This makes your content more visible to your target, more readily found through social search and increases your chances of prospects spreading your content further throughout their own social networks.

Which social media outposts will you be using as part of your inbound marketing strategy?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Social Media Marketing – Create Outposts to Drive Inbound Traffic is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Some people just are organized. Others need a bit of help staying focused. When it comes to managing your time given all the social media activities, the small business owner can get more than overwhelmed. I often get asked how I keep up with all of my social media activities and still get client work done (which does pay the bills!).

Two of the experts have provided their social media “systems”, showing you how they approach these activities.

• John Jantsch started this with his My Social Media System post and then asked others to share their systems as well.
• Chris Brogan then responded to being tagged by John and shared his workflow system.

As you can see, these two systems are very different and work for them. The point of both of their posts is to create a system that works for you, refine it as needed and eventually your social media strategy will become a habit. So let’s thank the above two folks (and others who have responded to John’s initial request) for suggesting we write down and share our systems, as I’m sure doing so will help us stick with it and make it a habit.

What helps me is to use my laptop for social media tools. It sits next to me on my desk with TweetDeck, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendfeed and other applications open in their own window so they don’t interfere with my client work that is on my desktop. I monitor these tools using the following system.

Daily:

Morning:

1. Check LinkedIn each morning for updates and questions
2. Check Facebook each morning for updates
3. Check Friendfeed and update my status across the social networks 

Continuous:

1. Check Twitter using TweetDeck every couple of hours (easy to organize groups and searches). Being open on the laptop, I can glance over to see who’s chatting and if interesting, join in.
2. Check email every couple of hours (clients send requests via email)
3. Monitor Friendfeed for updates and interesting conversations

Evening:

1. Scan Google Alerts blog feeds via Google Reader
2. Respond to Twitter followers – I check their profile to see if I want to follow back
3. Respond to LinkedIn connection requests
4. Respond to Facebook Friend requests
5. Subscribe to new friends on Friendfeed

Weekly (usually weekends):

1. Write blog posts for the week – schedule them to be published in the coming week
2. Tweak profiles across the many social media accounts
3. Check Webmaster tools for errors, issues needing fixing
4. Check Google analytics for information on traffic
5. Write a recommendation for a contact in LinkedIn, request one in return
6. Respond to other social media invitations

Being visible and participating in social media, like all marketing activities, takes time to reap the rewards. But if you come up with a system, and as John says, “work it day in and day out”, you will begin to understand what social media can and will do for your business as part of your marketing strategy.

Update: 2/14/09 – as I scanned my feed headlines in Google Reader I realized I didn’t incorporate reading and commenting on blogs into my personal social media system. That activity is normally part of my day and I will take a few minutes each morning and evening to scan, read those whose headline draws me in and comment when I have something to say. I also watch Twitter for notices of blog posts that seem interesting to me.

As with all plans, they are living and need to be modified. I will keep monitoring my use of social media and write an update to this as the system evolves.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Develop a Social Media System is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.