8 tips for the social media beginner

1. Add social bookmark links to relevant pages on your website and blog. Let people share your information with their contacts. You can download a free bookmarking widget from www.addthis.com.

2. Share an interesting article. If you come across a good article then share it with your followers because if you found it interesting then the chances are your followers will too.

3. Be aware of the serial follower. Although this may be against the spirit of some social media websites, don’t follow someone just because they follow you. Is someone following x thousands of people really interested in you and able to truly follow you, or is their objective to simply get as many people following them as possible? 

4. Promote your social media web-pages. You may want contacts and clients to follow you, so make it easy for them by having links to your social media web-pages in your email signature or footer and on your website. 

5. Manage social media responsibly and have a company policy. If you employ people the chances are that they will already be on a social media website. If you linkup with employees then there is a risk that their personal pages may contain information and images that may not fit with your brand. For example, do you really want your customers to know that Tim from accounts spent a stag weekend in Blackpool with a traffic cone on his head?

6. Ensure your social media marketing strategy is fully integrated with your traditional marketing and PR strategy. If you write, submit and publish articles on the web you should inform everyone in your social media network by bookmarking the link to your social media web-pages.

7. Link your various social media websites together. For example Twitter can feed directly to Facebook, and so on. This allows you to convey the same message to your different audiences but without the need to duplicate the message on each social media website. 

8. Use an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed on your website. For example my Tweets are fed to my own website where I have a dedicated webpage which is simply an RSS feed from my Twitter webpage. This encourages visitors to my website to follow me on Twitter. 

Require further assistance?

If you would like further guidance on social media you can contact JCG Marketing for a free no obligation discussion.