When it comes to marketing, social media is a given. If you're not utilizing it, you're missing a huge piece of the marketing puzzle. The trouble is that although most business owners and entrepreneurs know that blogging and social media are essential marketing tools, that's often where things stop. Topics such as how to best utilize social media, what sites to concentrate on, how much time to spend and how to most effectively communicate in this medium, are often mysteries for most businesses.
The first thing to keep in mind is that any social media campaign is greatly enhanced with the addition of a strategic, well targeted public relations effort. Appearing in the media gives you, your business, and/or your product the validation and credibility of being featured in the news, and gives you interesting topics to post, Tweet and share.
Being quoted or featured in the local, regional or national press helps establish you as an expert in your field, which greatly enhances the trust-factor that motivates buyers, clients and consumers. Even in today's ever changing communication landscape, PR remains the most important marketing tool that offers credibility. Social media and blogs are amazingly powerful and effective ways to reach the public, if you combine that outreach with the validation of media relations, you have a truly effective marketing program.
For example if you're featured in your local newspaper or in a regional magazine or in national media outlets such as CNN, Time, Newsweek or the Today Show, you want to amplify that coverage by posting, tweeting and generally letting the social media world know about that coverage. It gets your story out there to even more people and separates you from the others in your field. The fact that you've been featured in the media establishes you as an expert. Others who simply focus on social media, will not have the authority that type of validating press coverage offers.
Now that you understand the importance of combining a PR campaign with social media, back to how to best utilize social media. Initially, do some homework. Study the various sites including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube, etc. See who is on those sites. Study how they communicate, who they communicate with. Each site is different and has a unique focus and audience. For now let's look at Twitter.
The PR/Twitter Effect
Twitter is a quick moving, more wide open type of social media site than many of the others. To quote Wikipedia, "Twitter offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read other users' messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users may subscribe to other author tweets-this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers."
Twitter is based on short, quick, concise messages. People discuss everything from where they're having a cup of coffee, to an ongoing sporting event, to their business product and service. As with all social media outlets, this is not a place for a hard sell, but it is great for informing, educating and entertaining. It's a powerful tool for directing followers to other sites or links where a business can more fully explain or communicate. Studies also show that Twitter users are 44 percent more receptive to promotions and offers and more likely to recommend a product on Twitter. Twitter is great for promotions, give-aways, polls, and the like.
Many use a number of Twitter accounts. Google indexes tweets immediately, which is a plus and effective way to get immediate exposure for a product or brand. Twitter can be a very important online marketing tool in your overall approach. If it works for your type of company remember to combine a media relations outreach with your Twitter campaign.
Copyright © Anthony Mora 2010
I'm Anthony Mora, President and CEO of Anthony Mora Communications, Inc. and author of Spin to Win. We specialize in public relations, image development, media training and Transformational Marketing, http://anthonymora.com
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