22 Essential E's of Social Media

There are many essential elements that need to be embraced before you can succeed with social media. Of course, this list does not include all the elements, but only the important social media E's to get you started.

1. Education

Educating your prospects and customers is important to the success of your business. Not only are college and universities providing online education, but millions of people are going online to watch how-to videos, listen to podcasts, read informative blogs, etc.

2. Effective

A big part of social media success is creating clear, consistent, timely, and captivating content to effectively communicate with your community. The more strategic your content is, the more effective your efforts will be.

3. Efficient

Due to the amount of information, tools, and sites on the web, being efficient is certainly not easy, but it is also not impossible. If you have a plan, a schedule, and an editorial calendar in place, you will be extremely efficient when integrating this.

4. Effort

If you want to succeed in, you must put in some effort. Social media is about being proactive and making a real effort to research, learn, converse, test, and measure.

5. Embrace

Embracing means accepting the good, the bad, and the ugly. Although the social web has provided us with endless possibilities, it also opened doors to things that are not so great (spam, fraud, hackers, and privacy, concerns). Control the bad and embrace the good!

6. Empower

Empowering your community (prospects, customers, employees, etc.) is extremely powerful. It is essential to create a vision for your audience and empower them to take action on what they love, trust, and believe in order to fulfill a dream or a goal.

7. Encompass

A successful strategy should encompass all departments of a business: sales & marketing, PR, advertising, customer service, communications, business development, research, etc. Remember, it does not stop at marketing.

8. Encourage

Encouragement allows your customers to feel comfortable enough to start dialogue with you. It is vital to encourage or support feedback, comments, and sharing of information from your community.

9. Engage

Social media allows you to engage with your prospects, customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Engaging is about helping, giving, sharing interesting exchanges, and building community.

10. Enjoy

It is about being creative and having fun. To succeed, you must not only enjoy the work you do, but also enjoy the process. People can tell if you are posting things because you think you have to or because you are truly enjoying it.

11. Enlighten

By sharing your thoughts, ideas, stories, knowledge and expertise, you will enlighten and inspire your community. If you are a business with many employees, it is also essential to enlighten your employees.

12. Entertainment

A very large of your social media engagement strategy should include entertainment. The very first step in entertaining your audience is to be a person not a business. Your message should also be interesting and amusing enough to generate reaction, which increases chances of your message going viral.

13. Enthusiasm

It is crucial to create enthusiasm for adoption of social media within your organization. Also, generating enthusiasm (or excitement) will inspire your audience to be enthusiasts who spread your message for you. The goal is to find those influencers!

14. Escalate

You may run into situations where you deal with negative feedback and brand haters on social media sites. How you choose to deal with the negative comments is very critical to how you are perceived on this sites. If you don't handle it properly with a strategic repsonse, you will escalate the problem. Yikes!

15. Etiquette

Practicing proper etiquette is essential when networking on social platforms. The same etiquette rules that are used in the offline world should be applied online as well. For some basic reminders, this may be a good time to revisit "7 Rules of Social Media Netiquette."

16. Evaluate

You may be doing a fantastic job with integrating social media into your plans. However, you are missing the point of using it if you are neglecting to evaluate or measure your efforts. Measuring this can help you quantify the performance of your efforts, help you understand prospects and customers, tighten up the efficiency of your strategy, and use the information to adjust and optimize your plan.

17. Experiment

If you truly want to embrace social media, you must be willing to experiment. Once you have your strategy in place, it will take trial and error of different tactics to determine what is right for your business. Don't give up on this if a particular tactic is not working. You must experiment until something sticks!

18. Expertise

It has given many of us an opportunity to showcase our expertise faster than anything else out there. Sharing knowledge and expertise helps set you apart from competition and increases business results.

19. Exposure

If there is anything that can get you immediate exposure for your business, it's social media. If you are consistent with your plan, you will be able achieve instant visibility. This could mean a lot more opportunity.

20. Express

Like showcasing your expertise, you can freely express your thoughts, opinions, and ideas through platforms. Also, by creating two-way dialogue, you are giving a chance to your prospects and customers to express their ideas and opinions.

21. Extend

Whether it is answering a question, sharing a link to something informative, or pointing someone in the right direction, extending a helping hand goes a long way online because people will remember you when they need products or services you offer. Also remember to extend an offer on your website so you can convert prospects.

22. Eye-Catching

Due to the amount of content shared on social media platforms, you only have a few seconds to capture a person's attention. It is important to create eye-catching headlines for videos, articles, and blog posts. Also, you will engage more eyeballs if tweets and updates are interesting.

Named as one of the "smartest people in social media," Mirna Bard is a social media consultant who inspires organizations and entrepreneurs to leverage the Internet. You can find more information on Mirna and get practical, hype-free social media tips and business advice on her blog. You can also connect with Mirna on Facebook at http://facebook.com/socialwebstrategyconsultant where she gives great advice and fun giveaways.

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10 Essential Questions to Ask When Setting Up Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

The first step in setting up the right social media campaign for your business is to do an audit of all your social media marketing activities up to the present day. Once that is determined, your current state, you'll have a starting point from which to create the right plan and implement the proper strategies for your social media marketing campaign.

When conducting the audit, here are some essential questions to answer so you'll start you social campaign on the right road - eliminate wasted time and money.

1. What is the end result or goal of your social media marketing that you'd like to accomplish? More leads, more followers, more sales, more customer loyalty/confidence, more control over your companies reputation online.

2. What tracking methods will you use to determine if you have the right strategies in place to achieve the goals that you set? These are a few that are free to use and their invaluable... knowem.com, SocialMention.com, HowSociable.com

3. Do you need an in house social media manager (an employee), or is outsourcing the duties a better fit? Are you able to keep a full time employee on payroll which would probably include paying medical benefits, vacation and dealing with sick time...or is it better to find a social media management company and let them handle all the duties.By using a social media management company, you would only pay a set hourly/weekly/monthly fee and also have a custom package designed especially for your business.

4. What do your followers see as far as the sites or pages that you are directing them to from you social media networks? Are your profiles set up to deliver your followers, and potential customers, to a page that will get them to submit their name and email address (squeeze page offering a free eBook or special report) so you can start building a relationship with your list? No matter what site or page you're sending them to, be sure that there is a call to action on that page. If you're just directing them to your home page and hope they'll stick around and find the info they came for, you will be disappointed with your results. The average website surfer will only give your site 8 to 20 seconds to determine if it's what they're looking for.

5. Do all your social media marketing efforts link to each other and do they work in synergy with each other? Are your websites, blogs and social sites setup to interact with each other and work together to create a more viral effect? You have to make it easy for your subscribers to navigate around your site and share things on your site with others that they find valuable, interesting and important.

6. What other experts in your niche can you network with, and how do you find them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc...Are you networking with other people and groups within your niche market that may be already considered experts in the field? If you do, not only will you learn a great deal, but you'll also be able to develop relationships with these experts and therefore raise your own businesses status in the social communities. By aligning yourself with these experts that are already much respected in the social communities and within their niches, you'll gain an almost an instant respect and credibility. When this happens you'll see your subscriber numbers go through the roof because you'll have a great number of your subscribers share your sites and info with others.

7. What tools and software will you use to automate a portion of your social media marketing? There's a lot of programs and software to automate portions of you posting and tweeting with you followers/customers, most have a free option or trial as well as paid versions that will handle a lot more duties. Some of these include... Socialoomph.com, Socialblaster.com, Socialposter.com (submit to up to 250 social and bookmark sites at once!)

These sites provide a great way to give your followers and customers a constant drip of information and keep them in tune with what your company is doing. While this may seem like the ideal way to 'set it & forget it' be aware that the whole point of social networking is to answer and support comments and questions in real time. These automated systems can certainly help, but there is always going to be a need for a 'real person' to monitor the going's on.

8. Is your current social media campaign currently providing valuable information to your followers that is different then your competition? Just as in the early days of email marketing, the key to get people to become subscribers and followers was to give away high quality, valuable information in the beginning and expect nothing back in return. This is the stage of relationship building, and it's one that must NOT be overlooked. People only buy from those they know and trust. It's not only OK to stand out from the crowd...it's imperative! You must give without want in order to receive.

9. Is your website setup to allow interaction amongst your followers? Now a days most all websites have their own blog. Is you website allowing for your followers and subscribers to interact with each other? Having a very interactive site will allow followers or subscribers to build some of the content for you, as well, you'll be able monitor the conversations taking place so you'll know exactly what your subscribers want and need. Once you know the problems they are asking for solutions to, you'll be able to deliver laser targeted information to them.

10. How are you handling the input that is being contributed by your followers? Is there a dedicated person to perform this duty or is it shared? If this task is handled by a number of different people, you may find that there is no consistency when they respond to a comment or question from your subscribers on your site. By having all this monitored by a social media management company, or a single person, you'll be able to gain that consistency...not only in the responses, but also allowing the personality and manner of speaking of the company shine through. This will give your customers a greater sense of trust and confidence in your company.

These are just a handful of relevant questions and some valuable insights you, and/or your social media marketing manager should be answering in order to create a needed starting point, as well as an ever growing, consistent, ongoing social media marketing campaign.

Whether you have a social media manager, or you outsource the duties, there's no denying the time is now to start a social media marketing campaign...because you know that your competition already has.

Ron Richardson is the CEO of http://Social-Media-Management-Experts.com with dedicated, passionate people to handle all your companies' social media marketing needs! A consistent, comprehensive social networking and marketing campaign every day/week/month to dramatically increase a steady flow of website traffic, leads, referrals, better SEO rankings, word-of-mouth, name recognition, reputation management and of course new business. Grab your free copy of 'Social Media Marketing Explained'...Click Here

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