5 Key Social Media Infrastructure Elements To Support Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) January 23, 2012 --

In my last two blogs, I discussed the need and value of using social media as a key element of your marketing strategy and 9 killer applications that you can immediately employ to those ends. This week I thought it would be important to define some of the key social media infrastructure elements you need to enable you to use the 9 killer apps in your business . So I asked myself, just what is it you need to make all this great stuff work? What is it that you have to put together so that you can start to benefit from your social media marketing strategies? What I have come up with are 5 key elements of social media infrastructure that are essential to make it all work.

Establish Core Sites : What do I need to allow me to launch a powerful social media marketing strategy? I’m going to assume you have a website, but if not, get one. You are going to need a blog to allow interaction, you are going to need a Twitter account, a Linkedin Account, and a Facebook Account to help you market, advertise and receive information. If you are up for it, a video for your website which you can release through YouTube to help attract interested parties to your other sites.

Valued Content: The only way to get people to repeatedly return to your website or blog, is to make sure the content is valuable to them, informative, and from a business perspective, entices them to want to buy your services or products. Take your time on this: make sure you explain carefully what it is you are offering, what it can do for your customers and how they can obtain it. Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter need to reflect the same brand and marketing messages. Consistency of message is critical.

Interconnectivity: To make your social media structure work seamlessly and to ensure you can capture as many interested parties as possible, your social media sites have to be connected or linked to one another, and focused on acquiring comments, questions and requests to buy your services or products. Most blog or web sites will automatically collect feedback and questions for you. If your site is not set up to do this you need to add in a comment section. It is also possible to link your website to Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, which you should do, and make sure that you link comments on these sites back to your website.

External Links: Just as important as the “internal” interconnectivity, are your external links. Establishing two-way links with customers, resources and interested parties is essential to ensuring your message is received and that you obtain the feedback you desire; for example, linking to a customers’ website and them to your website, or linking to specific resource sites can significantly increase your ranking in search engine listings.

Analytics that Count: If you don’t measure it, it won’t improve, and if you don’t measure the right “it”, you may not achieve your objective. If you are in business to make money, then at the very least measure how much money you are making from this endeavor. Of course, measure links, hits, subscriptions, clicks, but do not lose sight of the goal. The simplest way is to measure your income before and after a campaign to see if you have impacted sales, the number of customers making purchases or showing interest and repeat customers, for example.

Hopefully this has given you something to think about. What do you want from your social media marketing? Have you included the key infrastructure elements? My goal is to make your life easier and to ensure you are as productive as possible. I hope you enjoyed this and that you will send me your comments, subscribe and link to my blog at http://mpconsulting.worpress.com , and if you need help, or need to ask me a question, then do so, I would be happy to help you.

Free Guides are available from my blog site on a number of business subjects including: Strategic Planning, Business Plans, Marketing Plans, Social Media Planning, Public Relations Planning, Time Management, Negotiating Strategies, Effective Business Meetings, Due Diligence, and many others. To visit my blog, go to
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MP Consulting Services specializes in the areas of strategic planning, leadership, marketing and social media. Mark Philip, principal at MPCS, has over 20 years experience in managing businesses, both small and large, has orchestrated multiple turnarounds, built product pipelines, launched new products, sold companies and created significant shareholder value. Let me know how I can help you with your business challenge.

For More Information: visit my blog at http://mpconsulting.wordpress.com or visit my LinkedIn account at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markpconsulting

Copyright © 2012 Mark Philip

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