Social Media Marketing is a great way to promote yourself, your products, your services, whatever. And the best part is it’s FREE and it WORKS virally.
It is a simple funda where you help yourself by promoting others. Surprising, nah? Believe me, that’s how social media works.
Interaction is the KEY!
FACEBOOK
You can set up your page on Facebook and tell the world what it is all about. There is a list of options such as Organisation, local business, books, blogs and many more. There’s also a sub-category that helps define what you do. If nothing, you can choose, ‘Just for fun’.
You can invite your friends to LIKE your page and this posts your page information on their walls. The information spreads virally.
This is a sure-fire way of getting a lot of people to know what you are trying to promote – be it your book, your skills or other products.
The best way to get people to interact with you on facebook is to post regular updates, preferably with pictures. You can post videos and links too, pertaining to what your page is about.
Another way to get people to your page is to show interest in others’ pages by liking them, commenting on their posts and generally interacting.
TWITTER
We all must be having twitter accounts. If not, please set one up, it’s quite easy. Connect it to your fb account. Whatever you post on fb will automatically be tweeted.
You can post links directly on twitter along with
#hashtags. Hashtags are used to create specific topics on Twitter. You can create your own hashtags or tag your posts with trending hashtags.
Eg: I want to post a blog link of a book review of my romance book. I open twitter and when I tag
#blog and
#bookreview and
#romance I get a dropdown I can select from. When I use these hashtags with the links I am posting on twitter, the link will be seen by all those people who check for tweets that have these tags. Chances are high that strangers will get to know about what’s on the link. You will get more people to follow you. You can return the compliment by following them.
BLOGS
Blogs are a great way to create your online presence. You can write about anything that interests you. Creating a clean copy will go a long way in making your blog popular. People don’t want to read wrongly written English. Blogs can be written in colloquial languages for that matter. A picture goes a long way to attract interest. As they say ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’. One thumb-rule though – you should have copyright to the picture or if you pick one off the internet, give the devil his due and name the website in the caption.
You can interact on this platform by inviting your friends and acquaintances to follow your blog. An even better way of garnering interest is to visit other blogs and following them if you like them and also by posting comments. You can even share the link of an article that you found interesting on other social media networks.
GOOGLE+ (g+)
Most online articles have the g+ icon at the end of it. If you click on it, you automatically share the article with your Google+ contacts. You can not only do this for your articles, but also for others’ articles that you found interesting.
GOOGLE SEARCH
Try to stick to your full name on all social media websites. Let your accounts also reflect this name – the name associated with your service or product or blog. The public will automatically make the connection. If the same name is up everywhere, it is also easy for google search to throw up your links every time.
For example,
Adite Banerjie,
Rubina Ramesh,
Sundari Venkatraman – check out google for these names. You will land up with links belonging to us. That’s because this name has been used everywhere on social media. If you use different names, the attention gets divided and all your links don’t show up on search.
IN CONCLUSION
There are more social media networks such as PinIt, Disqus, StumbleUpon, etc. But the ones mentioned above will suffice to begin with. Don’t feel threatened by so much information. It’s not possible to apply all of these at one go or in one day.
Try them one at a time. It will work over a period. As they say, Rome was not built in a day.
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