The Social Media Marketer

10 Ways to Take Your Social Media Marketing to the Next Level

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You think your social media marketing is set.  You’ve got your company’s Facebook page set up, have a Twitter account and even have a company blog.  But in today’s online and mobile environment, the basics aren’t enough.  To truly differentiate yourself, you need to bring your social media marketing to the next level.  Here are 10 ways to do that:

Blogging

1.  Develop great blog content.  Setting up the blog is the first step, but to really move into the advanced realm, you’ll need to develop great content.  Pick a theme, choose keywords and set up an editorial calendar to get the most from your company blog.

2.  Include social share buttons on your blog.  Make it easy for readers to share blog posts with their own followers on Twitter or Facebook friends with social share buttons.  This allows your great content to be shared easily by blog readers.  A TweetMeme button will allow readers to share the posts through Twitter, for example, so that your readers don’ t have to copy and paste the URL into their own Twitter client.

3.  Solicit guest bloggers.  If there’s an industry thought leader who could contribute a great post to your blog, don’t be afraid to approach her.  Suggest a topic you’d like to see covered and ask her to write a guest post.  This is the kind of content that establishes your company blog as a credible resource, not just another sales pitch.

Twitter

4.  Use Twitter desktop and mobile clients.  Manage Twitter activity, including Tweets, searches and responses, with a desktop or mobile client for Twitter.  Applications like TweetDeck, Seesmic and Tweetie can better manage your social media marketing through Twitter and do things that the website can’t do, like aggregate results in columns you set up in the program.  You can also use the web-based HootSuite to view your followers, direct messages and replies side by side in one window.  These clients also allow you to keep pace with trending topics.

Facebook

5.  Create custom content.  A standard company Facebook fan page isn’t enough.  It’s a fantastic extension of your brand, but to really jump-start your social media marketing, you’ll need custom Facebook content.  Applications like ShortStack can help you develop a quick, custom tab on your Facebook page.

6.  Run contests.  Small giveaways draw in Facebook “likes” and generate buzz for your business.  Periodically promote contests on your Facebook page that is just for your “fans.”

Mobile social networks

7.  Build robust profiles on mobile social networks.  Customers and clients increasingly turn to their mobile phones for information on businesses.  Make sure you have a presence on Yelp, Google Maps, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places and other mobile networks so that people searching for you can find reviews, check in to the location, and generate buzz for your business through their followers.

YouTube

8.  Create viral content.  Populate your YouTube channel with useful and fun videos that viewers will want to share.  Also, YouTube transcribes audio, so be sure to use keywords in the audio portion of your video.

Bringing them all together

9.  Leverage content across multiple social networks.  For example, once you’ve created a video and posted it on YouTube or Vimeo, write a blog post about it, Tweet about it and post it on Facebook.  Use multiple social networks for maximum exposure.

10.  Use a social media monitoring tool.  Social media monitoring tools like Sysomos’s Heartbeat and MAP aggregate data across multiple social media sources, including Twitter, Facebook, forums and blogs and allow you to search for specific keywords.  These tools cost money, but the ROI is immense when you consider how long it would take to manually obtain the data.