Social Media and Marketing Continued

In a previous post on social media, I mentioned several applications that most of us are familiar with through using them ourselves or by having heard about them. This is a continuation in my series on social media and the effectiveness of marketing your business through social media. I hope readers will find the information presented useful in helping them to take advantage of the social media applications they are using just as the top online moneymakers are now doing.

Turning your Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter account into a successful marketing machine is not difficult at all. Keeping the following tips in mind can help transform basic online socializing platforms into mega-successful traffic, income, and profit generators. I have condensed things a bit here by only mentioning 3 of the many popular social interactive sites available to users online today. Insert the name(s) of the social media applications that you use if they differ from the ones I have listed. The principles for using them to your advantage in business marketing remain the same nonetheless.

Ø Let the popularity of top social media applications do the work of finding traffic for you. Make sure that you set your profile or updates page to ‘public’ so that the larger flows of traffic to these sites can find you. Keeping it private will mean that you will have to find and invite people to visit your pages, which can be time-consuming and slow to show positive returns for your efforts.

Ø If you are using your social account for promoting yourself, your business, or business programs, be careful about posting negative opinions without some substantial information to back it up, or stuff you would be embarrassed for strangers to know about you. You will find that posting some personal things like having attended a concert or what you had for dinner will bring visitors and a lot of times followers to your social pages. You never know what seemingly mundane activities or subjects may spark someone else’s interest until you post something about it and gain traffic from it. Just temper such personal postings with common sense. Remember that once you post something in cyberspace it can exist forever.

Ø Do not use your social media applications to hard sell your business interests. No one responds very well to such tactics. Include links to articles, web tools, and sites that are likely to be of interest to your target audiences. Space these between your regular updates on your business products, services, etc.

Ø Learn how to create intriguing headlines and short sentences that really grab people’s attention. Space for communicating with others is typically limited in these social media applications so make the best use of the space that is available to you.

Ø Shortening links to your websites, blog entries, or articles you have posted online will give you more room for expressing why someone should want to click on the link(s) provided on your profile or updates pages. Many people use http://www.tinyurl.com/ for this purpose and I have used it myself.

By following these tips, you can supercharge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns using various social media platforms with less effort and time. Did you find this article helpful? Please share your comments.

In the next in this series on social media and social media marketing, we will be looking into synchronizing your site, blog, and forum RSS feeds and updates for greater visibility and productivity, and blog and forum postings for creating web presence and for branding and marketing your business products, services, and programs.

Author: Julie Morris. Freelance writer and blogger, all rights reserved. Visit my website: http://thewritestation.yolasite.com/ Contact me: twsstaff@yahoo.com

Streamline Multiple Inbox Messages for Greater Productivity

Keeping track of more than one inbox and updates to your Facebook, twitter, or other social accounts can cut into your time and productivity. Consolidating multiple accounts into a single condensed message that arrives to your main email account’s inbox can save you lots of time and can help you focus on getting more work done. You will not lose minutes logging in and out of each of the other email clients you have only to find the inboxes empty or filled with junk mail. Save time and increase your productivity by scheduling a short synopsis of the messages contained in each of your email accounts to arrive in a single email note to your main email account.

Nutshellmail makes this simple and supports most email clients such as: Yahoo, Gmail, MSN Live, Hotmail, and others and can grab updates form your social network sites like: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc to include in the single message sent to your main email account per the schedule you set. Learn more about streamlining the time you spend trying to keep track of messages and updates from multiple email and social network accounts so that you can be more productive online by visiting NutShellMail.

Promote Your Blog + Get More Readers

Beginning Series on Social Media and Social Media Marketing

This is the first in a series of articles on social media and channeling the power of social media into massively effective marketing campaigns. Many of us are already using popular and highly trafficked social applications like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Plaxo, Linkedin, and others to connect with family, friends, and colleagues. Then there are the zillions of blogs, bulletin boards, weblogs, vlogs, podcasts, forums, and niche sites that exist in cyberspace to enable people from around the world to socialize and communicate with one another on small and mass levels. Let us not forget communication tools like Skype, MSN Live, Yahoo Chat, IGoogle, and other instant messaging applications that also allow people plenty of online socializing opportunities as well.

The Internet has Granted Media Access to Everyone

Traditional or broadcast media remains primarily a restricted medium with access reserved mostly for industry professionals with a few exceptions. Social media on the other hand is an open-access medium that allows almost everyone with an internet connection to generate web content and to share that content with small or large audiences, locally, internationally, and as most of us know-globally! You do not have to have professional associations, media-related degrees, or a huge bankroll to participate in social media. Most social applications are free to use and basic spelling and grammar skills or a quality program that checks for mistakes before publishing to the web, is all one really needs to begin building an audience of readers The more skills that you have the more you can take advantage of all that this platform known as social media offers

Well-informed entrepreneurs have found these online social media applications to be great sources for excellent business advertising and branding with little or no costs to them and requiring barely any effort at all besides catchy headlines and some carefully chosen words. We will be exploring social media business marketing, branding, and other concepts involved in utilizing the power of social media successfully in other articles in this series.

I would love to read your thoughts or any additional information and knowledge that you could share with readers about social media and social media marketing.

Fourth of July Humor

Just a few jokes to yuck it up with this weekend. Please share your clean fun jokes.

Q. Why did Paul Revere ride a horse to warn the British were coming?

A. The horse was too heavy to carry.

Q. Mix a small curly haired dog with a patriot and what do you have?

A. You have a Yankee poodle.

Q. What would you get if you mixed cattle feed and George Washington?

A. You would get the fodder of our country.

Q. Early settlers were much like ants because why?

A. They too lived in colonies.

Q. What might Thomas Jefferson’s favorite dessert have been?

A. Monti-jello

Q. What would you get if you mixed America’s national bird with snoopy?

A. You would get a bald beagle.

Q. What would you get if you mixed a tepee with a colonial wig?

A. you would get a powdered wigwam.

Q. What did the man say to his friend as they were parting ways after their visit to the Statue of Liberty?

A. Stay in torch buddy.

Q. What was the name of the ghost that haunted King George the III?

A. The Spirit of 76

Q. What is red, white, blue, and green?

A. Uncle Sam suffering from seasickness.

Happy Fourth of July 2009

Many people will be having cookouts with family and friends, attending parades and festivals, and watching night skies illuminated by colorful fireworks this Fourth of July. This is a time to celebrate and have fun, but it is also acknowledge and offer our deepest thanks for the sacrifices that our military men and women make on behalf of protecting the liberties the rest of us take for granted far too often. Have a safe and fantastic 4^th of July!!!