What has always been the most effective way to generate new business? Referrals from existing customers with their friends and families.

Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive and most productive form of advertising. A lot of people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only one 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a confident return on investment. No one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers will make a purchasing decision using the input of friends and family.

Social media marketing provides the electronic platform for word of mouth marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The common Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets venture out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views per day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more prevalent today through social media marketing than any other time in the history of business. Can your company afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?

If you’re like me, you study from making mistakes. However, if you can learn from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. Why not learn from the mistakes of others? Below are a few common mistakes new marketers make when trying to create and implement a social media marketing plan:

I’ll figure it out when i go- the biggest time waster is going right into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take the time to get educated on social media sites. Not all sites are designed for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will result in many companies abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the basics of setting up these site, understand the various options, and spend your time engaging instead of fixing problems. There are good online educational programs on the market that can teach business owners on how best to create and implement a social media plan.

Let’s add 100 sites in a single day- it’s tempting to go out and develop a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at once. But the problem with this particular strategy is that should you grow too fast, you won’t be able to keep up with all the great things about each site. The very best approach would be to create one site, like Facebook, learn the facts and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and build relationships others. If you start up 12 at once, you won’t be as active and your lack of participation could defeat your overall goal. It’s easier to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social media sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.

Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with individuals who don’t possess complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, lots of people will see you before they find your website. If they find your site and you also have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most importantly, be personable.

Here’s the pitch- here’s the biggest stumbling block for most beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This kind of media is really a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a new medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Rather than selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself being an expert in the field where you are practicing. For instance, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on which they can do to market a house themselves. The truth is, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you’ll become an expert on the subject. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell his or her house, they will probably ask for your services.

Same approach to communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people prefer to read, others like video, plus some people will be attracted to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up how you post. If you to put it simply out a blog every day, your followers will become blind to your communication method. Change it up a little. For those who have a blog 1 day, then put up a simple video another. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you’ll achieve.

Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media activity. This doesn’t imply that you have to make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal would be to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, you’ll find it’s easier to have 1 post each day than 3 days with 10 posts.

Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I would use to communicate with people. Needing to log into multiple accounts each day to check the emails became annoying, frustrating, and ineffective. Motivational Content is, it became to frustrating to do this and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load most of my email accounts into Outlook, I was able to efficiently check and make use of the benefits of email. The same applies to social media. When you have to log into and log from 5 different social media sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your level of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that may allow you to log into all your social media accounts for interactions may be the easiest way to make sure that you consistently implement your social media marketing plan. Again, there are several good all-in-one social media marketing dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social networking efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner seeking to create a social media marketing plan for your business, you then absolutely should educate yourself on how to utilize the technology and find tools to work with you in the daily utilization. Unless you know how to build a house and you don’t have a hammer, that house isn’t likely to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in this article, it will be easy to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media plan.

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