Social Media Marketing: It’s All About Choice
Using Twitter to increase the number of fans on your Facebook Page
I often get asked how to get the maximum benefit from social media investing the least time.
It seems that many people are looking for high impact results with little effort. I remember listening to Richard Delevan last year at an event hosted by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce comment that you needed to invest at least 3 hours a day in social media communications.
Shel Holtz a good friend and excellent teacher in the world of social media communications recently wrote about why he spends 14 hours a week researching, creating content, editing and publishing his two podcasts each week.
Fred Caballero of Channelship an SME here in Ireland posted their social media plan for 2010 – note they are a web development agency so their plan may not be as relevant for your business. Adding up the number of hours they plan to spend posting one article to their blog, and then using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn each week they openly disclose that they plan to spend between 18 hours to 25 hours each week (this excludes their time creating, editing and posting video and their 5-10 hours per month they estimate on their newsletter).
I can hear you now commenting that you would find it a challenge to find even 1 hour a day to include social media in your communications and marketing plan. But for me it’s about choice – we absolutely should spend some time marketing our business either online and offline each day. So do you choose to invest in promoting your business, products and services to consistently attract more leads? Or would you rather not see a stream of referrals and business leads being attracted to you?
We must choose the audience we want to connect with so that we are efficient and can produce relevant content that they will find of benefit and which will help position you as the thought leader or go to business for the services and products you offer.
We must choose the relevant communication channels to reach our market – that may not be social media – or it could be one or two social media channels. I teach my clients that it’s not about using every social media platform – I would much rather they do a great job on one or two social media platforms than be mediocre across many.
One area I am constantly reviewing and refining is how I am more efficient in my own marketing. I do syndicate and re-purpose my content across a number of channels and am looking for ways to achieve the highest impact with my marketing processes and systems.
One thing I have explored, is posting to Twitter from Facebook. Last year Facebook announced that they were enabling posting updated from your Facebook Page to Twitter – you need to connect your Twitter account to your Facebook Page at www.Facebook.com/Twitter.
You then have the choice of what you post from your Facebook page – including status updates, photos, video’s.
Let’s take for example posting your status updates from your Facebook Page to Twitter. The problem is that this is often implemented poorly – I’ve seen so many posts on Twitter where the end of the message ‘trails off’, there is no call to action so no reason for me to follow a link through from Twitter and where the SEO opportunity from Twitter is not taken advantage of.
If you choose the Facebook to Twitter application for your Facebook page you only have 420 characters on Facebook to post a message. The application automatically publishes part of your message from your Facebook page and then a short url is generated so that in Twitter people see the first part of your post on Facebook followed by a link to the rest of the status update on Facebook.
One of the tips I recommend when Tweeting is to post around 120 characters in your Tweets to enable people to easily retweet your message without running the risk that your message will be shortened. So I was interested to explore a comment by Mari Smith on Facebook who was showing how she created what she called a ‘Perfect Facebook to Twitter fan page status update’.
Let me explain how that works. Just take a look at this Tweet I did as an example from my Marketing Mentor Facebook Page. By posting a short introduction, followed by the link to the article I was referring to it meant that the resulting Tweet allowed for retweeting and had a good call to action. That increases the chances that people will follow the link back to your Facebook Page from Twitter where they can read the rest of the status update (remember you can post up to 420 characters as I mentioned before).
So the benefit is that if you choose to add the Facebook to Twitter posting from your Facebook Page, you could find it a way to be efficient with your social media marketing. and there is a bonus- if you are providing great content on your Facebook page people may then favourite it or even become a fan.
What is your favourite social media marketing tip that you are choosing to use this year to build your community and boost profits?
And how much time do you choose to spend using social media platforms implementing your social media communications programme?
Article by Krishna De and courtesy of Biz Growth News blog
