Beginner's Guide

You are new to Social Media Marketing? Take a look at our Beginner's Guide on SMO.

Where do you start?
Planning is the first and critical step to determine your result. A good planning can make your project run smoothly all the way, in other way round, a poor one can bring your project ended in disaster. When you start to prepare for your online business, you have to determine what goals and resulting metrics you want to attain.

SMO helps you achieve these top goals:

• Website Traffic and User Behavior (External and Internal Tracking)
• Conversion and Sales Tracking
• Page Views, Ad Exposure
• Growing Brand Awareness (Take time to see the result)
• Creating and Maintaining a Positive Brand Association
• Business Development and a Broader Customer Reach

How do you achieve these goals via social media?
Social media provide online platforms for you to interact with others, create and promote content for links getting and viral attraction, and reach key influencers.

Check out the 16 Tips below. Involve yourself in the social media through:

1. Aiding:

Try not to talk too much about yourself, at least initially, and provide ways to help others instead. In the world of social media, it's all about "them", not "you" oriented. If you are creating your new del.icio.us profile, make sure to bookmark other useful resources and sprinkle yourself lightly.

2. Planning:

Set goals and a process for your SMO campaign. We recommend you to read 5 pillars to know more about social media marketing. SMO program is also like SEO's that requires a process involving keyword research, competitive review and content analysis. Don't start everything too fast without a real plan; otherwise, you will get nothing from it.

3. Contribution:

Get the great opportunities to create quality content in the community. The majority in the community are reading online, while only a small group of people is contributing. Be the one who makes good content.

4. Connection:

Reach out to the influencers and get connection with them. You'll find how powerful these Brand Advocates can be and what they would benefit you.

5. Position:

Position yourself in front of consumers' passions, to engage the influential advocates and achieve a powerful outcome for your brand.

6. Blogging:

Don't for get to open your Blog. Technorati is now tracking over 110 million blogs and will be in a growing pace.

7. Linking:

Make sure to get linked to other blogs and websites. Search engines and users would get good use of them.

8. Video Broadcast:

Video is a fast-growing channel of spreading messages and getting attention nowadays. Create your own videos and submit to popular video sharing websites like YouTube, which provides you a wide reach of audiences. For greater distribution, try tubemogul.com or vidmetrix.com. In your content, please keep the #1 rule in mind - No Direct Selling.

9. Technorati:

Claim your blog at Technorati to ensure you are indexed in their search engines for blogs. Updates are circulating across the network,along with your own blog network updates.

10. Web Analytics:

Open an account in social media such as facebook and Twister; use your brand name as identifier. Start by working with one or two social media. Check your web analytics, track referring domains, and review traffic movements daily or weekly.

11. Feeds or Research:

Subscribe to feeds and choose iGoogle, MyYahoo or other favorite RSS readers. Keep track with the changes. Be the first commenter and engage in the topic, so you will get more visibility and awareness.

12. Micro-communities:

Join social communities that are relevant to your business. It is much easier to get your messages read and get feedback in these and similar markets. Contribute highly relevant and link-worthy content, look at what others are writing about, and reach the top players and influencers.

13. Submission:

Make sure the content you submit is useful and unique with an appealing title that gets your post stand out. Ask friends to vote and comment on your postings (Try to befriend others, but not to spam). Remember not let your company employees to post from the same location or IP Address, because your submission(s) will probably be rejected. Your account may even get banned or suspended.

14. Hosting:

It is important to hire a reliable hosting provider. What if traffic spikes come and your server infrastructure fails to handle it? Let's take a look on how can you deal with the Digg Effect.

15. Monitoring:

We recommend Yahoo Pipes, a time-saving social monitoring desktop in a browser, which allows you to observe many resources within the social networks.

16. Advertising:

For the advertisers, check out socialspark.com and socialmedia.com.