We’ve all heard the murmurs about the power of social networks for marketing. If you do a little bit of searching you can find places where there is much shouting and hubbub over using Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn to promote your business. All the hot hip trendy business mags like Fast Company and Wired give much space and attention to the power of this new media to drive customers into your business.
Should you get involved with social media marketing? As with so many things in life, the answer is, “it depends.”
Good Social Networking Soil
If your business is primarily transactional, and cultivating long term relationships with customers is neither practical nor desirable, you might find other strategies more useful. For many businesses, however, by keeping in regular contact with your key customers (who opt in) is a very helpful way to maintain top of mind awareness so that when the need for your product or service arises, you are the one who gets the call. It’s a corollary to the old proverb — the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Or perhaps an even better metaphor is “you reap what you sow.”
In order to reap, you have to sow.
What to Plant on your Social Network
The key is to provide value in every posting. Something worthwhile that in and of itself will be useful to your friends, followers and connections. Certainly each status update and tweet should be promotional – it’s about your business after all. Just be sure that each short message is a seed, not a pebble. Seeds are ideas that can grow and yield fruit. Pebbles just sit there. Seeds. That’s what you want.
Where do you find the time to do all this? Well, you could do it yourself. Or…you can hire someone to do it for you. Figure out how often you need to post and hire someone to write the posts and put them out on your account. The fee will vary depending on how often you need to post and how many different sites you want to post to. Start with a three month arrangement and track the results, but realize that this is the sort of endeavor that may not yield fruit right away. That’s why it’s called cultivating a relationship. It takes time.
By the way…feel free to friend me up on Facebook. Just search for Rock Solid Writing.
If you prefer Twitter you can follow me there by the name rcksolidwriting.
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David is a freelance writer for hire offering copy writing for print and web, article writing, sales letters, training manuals, , seo content, sales writing, blog articles, copywriting service, sales scripts and business name ideas.
To learn more, or request a quote visit http://www.rocksolidwriting.com/freelance-writer-quote/