The world wide web is huge and social media marketing can get quickly overwhelming when you are busy signing up for every social networking site and bookmarking site in order to effectively market your business to as many people as you can possibly get the information out to. While it is important to work on exposing your brand to the masses, becoming strategic about where you put your social media marketing efforts are going to take away some of the overwhelm.
It is also going to be much more effective to focus on marketing to the right people than it is to market to all the people. For example, having a Facebook Timeline page with 1,000 followers and zero customers is not going to grow your business very fast. In contrast, having 150 followers that are turning into customers is going to create a return on investment that is going to continue to make it worth your time to continue marketing efforts.
With this in mind the first item to consider is where your target market is most likely to show up. While Facebook should definitely be a social networking venue to market on, you may find more success keeping the majority of your efforts focused on LinkedIn if you are a business that caters to professionals or other businesses. The next thing to keep in mind is the content you post. The content you post must appeal to your target market, and to the niches that will get excited enough about your content to share it with others.
Keeping your target market and niche markets in mind when you produce content for your social media marketing efforts will allow you to engage with those that will either buy your products or services, or talk about your products or services to their customers, friends and followers. For example, if you run gardening and landscaping business, producing content that talks about the best way to grow and use herbs and spices by using decorative raised gardens, you will appeal directly to your target market. You will also appeal to cooks that want to grow fresh herbs and spices for their recipes. They in turn will share your information with cooks that are interested in learning about growing herbs and spices. Some of those cooks most likely own homes and would like landscaping down. Plus, the added weight for the search engines from inbound links to your content will help your search engine rankings increase and you will notice that potential customers find you more easily.
