Guest Post This week by San Diego Corporate Marketing Strategist Holly Reville

1.) What is Social Media?

2.) Branding

3.) Keep it Professional

4.) Messaging

5.) Where to Begin

6.) Networking

7.) Promote

What is Social Media? – Social Media is an ever-growing and ever-changing new phenomenon. It’s the new wave of meeting, networking and connecting with people, most importantly a new method of meeting new potential clients and marketing your business for free. If you stop for a moment to think about the magnitude of this it’s mind boggling. At any given moment there is a worldwide network of people at your reach. Isn’t that an amazing concept? No longer are we restricted to networking within our immediate geographical location. Best of all, people are friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. Those who are not, are weeded out and blocked fairly quickly. The big question that lies in everyone’s head is, “How?” This blog will give you some key insights on what you need to get started and successfully market yourself, product or company through the use of social media platforms.

Branding – In branding, your goals are to gain brand awareness, associate certain qualities and characteristics that make you/your company unique and over time gain brand loyalty. If you plan on marketing your business through social media it is important to keep brand integrity intact. Your brand is an extension of you and your company. How does this translate to social media?

A.) Avatar/picture – Make sure you use a good picture. A professionally taken picture is highly recommended, but if you choose to take your own just make sure you are dressed in a professional manner and have someone take it for you or use your timer. You do not want the “picture taken in the mirror shot showing the camera”. Use this picture on all of the social networking websites. This will give you brand consistency and increase recognition across platforms. It is important to use your picture. Social networking is about creating relationships, people want to know there is a real person behind the company façade and get to know that person.

B.) Name – You wouldn’t put a different business name on all of your sales material so make sure you don’t have different user names on your social networking websites. When social networking for your business it is common to have your full name or full business name as a user name, whatever you choose, just keep it consistent.

C.) Description – Be sure to describe your company, who you are and what you do on all of the social media profile pages. This is the first and possibly last place an interested person or potential client will go to find out more about you. Have a thorough, concise description and double check spelling and grammar. The description can vary from site to site and be custom tailored to the audience, just make sure all of the essentials are there to easily tell people about you/your company.

D.) Custom colors and background – Most of the social networking websites have an option to customize your page. When doing so try to make sure the colors and images used are consistent across all websites. This will also associate these colors and images to your brand and help you to achieve brand recognition.

For the rest of her VERY INSIGHTFUL post Click Here

Special Thanks to Holly For allowing us to share her work for our readers. Please subscribe to her blog- Thanks
Justin

Tags: Business, Marketing, San Diego, Social Media, Social Networking

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 9:59 PM and is filed under Business Advice, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.