How To Use Social Media To Grow Your Business If You Are Green Or Want To Be Green

Sometimes referred to as new media, social media marketing (SMM) is a collective term that includes blogs, microblogs, and social media marketing and networking sites. You may know them better by their brand names. The most popular micro-blog is Twitter®. Social networking sites include LinkedIn®, Facebook® and Plaxo®. YouTube® is popular for social marketing, as are Stumbleupon® and Digg®. You can use some or all of these and other social media marketing sites to positively impact your bottom line!

Connect

Using SMM requires a clear understanding of strategy, which we’ll get to. For now, just know that using social media effectively is a process of connecting, communicating, and then community building. You need to connect with people to be able to tell your story. All of the sites mentioned above help you make that connection in different ways. To get started, you need to make a presentation. If you’re meeting someone in person, you can ask, “Tell me about yourself (or your business).” With SMM, you’ll accomplish this with a bio: a descriptive biography of you and your business, the sole purpose of which is to get the online conversation moving in the right direction. For example, you may be wondering how I came to write this column and if we have anything in common. So here it goes. I have been a salesperson my entire career. My first job after getting my MBA was in sales and marketing with Conoco Phillips. I was promoted to Regional Marketing Manager before leaving after 10 years to launch my landscape contracting business. Everything I knew about corporate marketing had little value in my residential landscaping business, except for one. He needed clients, and the only way to get them is to go out and meet people. I joined organizations in my community like Rotary International and the Chamber of Commerce, and as a result, everything went well. This is my history. When I hear yours, we’ll have something to talk about. We’ll just need a place where we can communicate.

Communicate

When I was growing my landscaping business, I had a lot of meetings at job sites. At my corporate job, we would meet at the office water cooler, in airports and at conferences, or wherever we could meet. There are all kinds of places to meet and build relationships with people. These places are called platforms. They are the place where people come together to share valuable information and build relationships that foster business. That’s what social media will do for you. It’s a digital platform that helps you get your message across, in words, images, videos, and more. It’s important to remember that social media doesn’t replace what you’re doing now that it’s working; complements it. Social media only works to connect you with more people, more often, to get more business.

Community

Everyone has a story to tell. The challenge is to make it interesting so that people want to hang out and learn more. Social networking sites allow you to have a dialogue. This is what makes them better than websites for promoting your business. Websites are a monologue: only you speak. Bla bla bla. That’s boring! So lighten it up. Don’t push your product. Just help us get to know you so that we want to buy your product. get excited. make us laugh Dazzle us with information about something that no one has told us. Tell us how you got here, where you come from, and who helped you along the way. Wear what makes you most genuine, authentic, and real. This is part of the magic of successful social media marketing.

Starting

Some of you are making progress with social media marketing now while others have not started yet. Don’t worry; We’ll bring them all together in the next column as we begin to learn the unique qualities of each individual platform and how to use them most effectively. For now, let’s focus on strategy. To be successful with any marketing medium, you must be clear about your goal and have a means to measure your success. You obviously have revenue and profit business goals. Now consider how social media can help you achieve those goals. For example, if the success of your business depends on having lots of customers, you may want to focus on growing a larger “fan base” of people who are familiar with your business and what it has to offer. If your projects are specialized, you may prefer to carve out a narrow niche for a specialty where you are more likely to succeed. Finally, you may be looking to establish a new identity to rejuvenate your brand. An obvious one that comes to mind is being the green business leader in your market.