Quick Social Media Marketing for your Business

Even if you’ve been living under an isolated rock in Siberia, you’re probably familiar with Facebook and Twitter. Besides seeing pictures of friends and family, finding out that Joe just had dinner, and that Mary is going to see a movie, did you ever think about the broad reach and marketing potential of these social media sites? Have you thought about how you could use that power to promote yourself and your business, make new contacts, and create new business relationships?

Building a professional online presence is essential in today’s business world. It gives prospective clients, employers, employees, etc. a controlled view of you and your business. It also provides valuable credibility. How do you view a business without a website, or just a lousy, annoying one? Additionally, your professional presence shouldn’t be limited to just LinkedIn, you need to show up on Facebook, Twitter, and it wouldn’t hurt to blog, either. Why? Because that’s where 500 million users are spending their time, and that’s how you can generate new leads and new business from sources you never could have reached as easily, before.

I’m not going to suggest what content you should be creating and promoting because that will vary wildly depending on your line of business and the size of your company, but keeping your content updated and fresh is very important. The more links and updates that you have going to your website, the better it looks to Google and other search engines. That’s search engine optimization. Why does that matter? Because if your website ends up on the first page of search results, then you’re more likely to get a call from an interested, potential customer.

This may sound like a big headache to coordinate the content and updates to multiple sites, then aggregate all of those updates back for inclusion onto your business website. However, the beauty of it is that with a little bit of coding on your website, and the use of a free cloud based mashup utility like Yahoo Pipes to configure your content feeds, the whole process can be automated and hands free. Write a new blog, boom, it’s not only on blogger, or another free blog site, but it’s also on your company site automatically. Relevant posting to Facebook or Twitter, tag it and it can also be automatically fed to your website.

Once you get your social media marketing framework setup, all that’s left to do is to get your employees and co-workers actively engaged in creating some content. Schedule that production and you’ll have a constant stream of fresh ideas and updates hitting your website, then it will come back on the first page of a search in no time!