How to Integrate Social Media Marketing and Increase Your Business in 2013

With the New Year upon us, it’s time to examine your business and where you want to go in 2013. This is a great time for trying new things, implementing new marketing plans and setting goals for your business. If your goals involve social media marketing, it’s more easy than ever before to integrate this with the marketing you are already doing.

Let’s take a look at how social media helps and how you can merge these techniques into what you’re already doing.

Use Your Social Connections

One of the best way to begin to integrate social media marketing is to use the social connections you currently have and build on them. People are more likely to purchase from someone their friends recommend. These recommendations come with the clout of a friend so they hold more weight than an advertisement alone. Encourage your network and fans to share your content to their own networks and connections. Research shows that shared content like this has more weight with the user than when it comes directly from the source company.

Think Bigger than Facebook

While Facebook is definitely a leader, there is more to social media than just Facebook and you will be greatly limiting your marketing reach if this is the only social network you try. Many consumers use YouTube to help them research a product before they buy and brands are talked about across all networks, not just Facebook. So don’t limit your marketing tactics to one social platform alone.

Use Visual Imagery

Speaking of YouTube, building your visual content is very important. Pictures/images, infographics and video are all great ways to build your brand and you can share this content on social media with ease. Create a video about your company or product, a how-to/instructional video in your niche or an introductory video telling about who you are. Then share that video as much as you can. Buy YouTube views and your ranking in the search results so that more people see your videos, increasing your brand’s social media presence.

Don’t Over Promote

You also need to be cautious of over promoting yourself or having your social posts come off like advertisements. There are places where this is acceptable (such as in a Facebook ad) but the rest of the time, your social encounters should be personable. This doesn’t mean that everyone wants to know what you have for breakfast every day of the week but rather that you should be engaging your network, asking them questions and answering theirs. This is how you build customer trust and respect.

Convert Social Media Fans to Email Subscribers

Now another point to social media marketing is that it means very little if it’s not converting for you. Monetate says social media has low conversion rates relative to email. Despite this, you can use social media as a tool to get more email subscribers. This is how you can complete the entire process and use social media marketing to increase your business in 2013.

Do you have any specific tips or tricks to using social media for your business? Is there anything you are going to try new in 2013?