How many businesses do you know of out there that are using Facebook and Twitter marketing smartly?

Social media marketing is still finding its “level” somewhat but it seems to me that many businesses misinterpret the opportunities that Facebook and Twitter provide. So below we try to clear that up with some guidelines for the essential approaches involved – and they ARE different.

Essentials Of Twitter Marketing

Twitter is all about engaging with your clients and other people – in 140 characters or less!

The idea is that through Twitter you can disseminate quick information, often in text message style short-hand. This allows you to keep your customers up to date with what’s going on and to share industry news – the shortened URLs provided by the likes of bit.ly allow you to send links to others easily and effectively now.

The purpose is to engage with your customers; you don’t have to follow everyone who follows you but it’s great to stay across the comings and goings of leaders within your industry, for example.

If there are particular topics that are relevant to your business you can search Twitter to see what conversations are happening – and you can choose to join the ones that interest you.

Like most social media marketing, it’s not about pitching your products and services; it’s more about introducing yourself to the crowd, engaging with them and making the human connections; the offers can come later!

Essentials Of Facebook Marketing

Learn to do social media conversations.

Many of the essentials of Facebook marketing are similar, with a few important differences.

The biggest difference is that, with Facebook, you are trying to ratchet up the level of interest and engagement with your “fans” using richer media than merely text and links. You can really build a community of followers if you use all the tools at your disposal and concentrate on providing interesting, informative and fun content on your fan page.

You may have a personal page as well as a business page and give different people access to them; your real-life friends may be on both, some clients may be on both, but others you will want to keep only on the business page.

Your personal page is a good way of giving glimpses about you, the person, rather than you the business.

It’s important to take care with naming your “business” Facebook fan page. For example we opted for the “SEO Mastermind” name rather than “Mellbourne SEO Services.”

This is for a very good reason: people come to Facebook to engage with other people and to find out news and what’s happening; they don’t come to be sold to; in fact they will reject you if you bombard them with offers all the time.

This is where many businesses go wrong – it’s not about how many offers you provide, but when you provide them; take time to get to know your followers first –communicate and converse with them, bond with them and provide them with content – then they will allow you to weave an offer or two into the mix. Competitions are great for that and we discuss that in a separate blog post.

There is more practical advice on how to use Twitter and Facebook marketing in your online business in the Competition Crusher workshop. You can watch it for free by clicking here.