4 Easy Steps to Implement a Facebook Marketing Strategy
Do you have a Facebook marketing strategy?
Is your Facebook marketing is working?
If you don’t have a strategy with goals in place for your Facebook Page, you won’t know if you are getting a return on your social media efforts!
Your Facebook marketing strategy shouldn’t live in a vacuum—it needs to be integrated with your overall marketing plan.
What You Need to Get Started
Before you start marketing on Facebook, you should have these things in place:
- A good website: Your website is the hub of your business and should look professional and showcase what you have to offer your customers.
- A clear business model and plan: How are you making money? This sounds obvious, but many entrepreneurs don’t have a solid business plan and don’t understand things like the cost of goods or how much money they can (and should) allocate toward marketing.
- An email marketing delivery service: Some large consumer products may not need an email delivery system, but most businesses still need to use email marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. Email is not dead and is your best chance of being seen by the bulk of your current and potential customers. There are many email providers out there to choose from, including Constant Contact, AWeber, iContact, Infusionsoft, MailChimp, Office Autopilot and more. Find one that fits your needs and budget.
- An optimized Facebook Page: Before you start marketing on Facebook, get the basic elements of a good Facebook Page in place.
Once you have done these things, you can begin to integrate your Facebook marketing with your overall marketing plan. 
Research Shows Blogging a Top Focus for Marketers
Do you ever wonder what tactics, tools and strategies other social media marketers are using?
Regardless of how long you’ve been involved in social media, chances are you have some questions that you’d like answered.
Questions such as, “What are the best social management tools?” or “What are the best ways to engage my audience with social media?”
These and many more questions were answered in the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which surveyed over 3000 marketers with the goal of understanding how they use social media to grow and promote their businesses.
Here are some interesting findings from the survey:
#1: Marketers Want Most to Learn About Blogging
When asked what social media platform they wanted most to master, 62% of marketers said blogging, putting it in first place slightly ahead of Google+. This answer is consistent with other studies, which show that the appetite for blogging education is growing.
An important trend to consider is that 28% of marketers now have mobile-optimized blogs. This is highly significant when you consider that the number of smartphone subscribers in the world has broken the 1 billion mark.
Blogging takes first place as the social media platform most marketers want to learn about.
Facebook Hashtags: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Facebook Launches Clickable Hashtags: Clickable hashtags are rolling out on Facebook. “When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you’ll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic.”
"Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion."
Pinterest Success: Creative Ways to Use Pinterest for Your Business
Do you use Pinterest for business?
Are you wondering how your business can benefit from Pinterest?
To learn some creative ways to use Pinterest to help your business, I interview Cynthia Sanchez for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.
It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.
The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).
In this episode, I interview Cynthia Sanchez, host of the Oh So Pinteresting Podcast. She freely admits that she’s addicted to Pinterest. It’s changed her life in a major way and now she helps other businesses figure out how to tap into this growing network.
Cynthia shares how you can use Pinterest for market research and how to get your content seen by more people.
You’ll learn about some of the most popular trends on Pinterest and how to create attention-grabbing images.
Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
Listen Now
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You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, Stitcher or Blackberry.
How to Improve Your Social Media Marketing Return on Investment
Have you ever been asked to show the return on investment (ROI) for your social media work?
Have you had trouble giving an exact number to explain your ROI or even set quantitative goals for your social media?
25% of marketers said that their biggest marketing challenge was finding the ROI of their marketing activities.
In this article, I’ll show you how to tweak some of your social media actions with your business goals in mind and make them easier to tie to your ROI.
#1: Use Social Media to Promote Your Offers
Social media is an important channel to promote any content you create. Whether you’ve created an ebook, blog post, webinar or white paper, you should promote it through social media.
Tap into your social audience whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or Pinterest.
Social Media Examiner uses Twitter to share content and generate traffic.
As you can see on Twitter, it’s important to link to all of your content with your tweets. And remember to include hashtags to gain further visibility on Twitter.
5 Ways to Generate More Business From LinkedIn
Is LinkedIn working for you?
Do you want to generate more business from LinkedIn?
When used properly, LinkedIn can be a gold mine for your business.
Here are five steps to improve your efforts to generate more business from LinkedIn.
Follow these steps to get more out of your LinkedIn efforts.
5 Creative Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog Posts
Do you want more traffic to your blog?
Are you struggling to catch the attention of more readers?
Does this sound familiar? You write an amazing piece of content. You made sure to craft an attention-grabbing headline. You share the link on Twitter, Facebook, even Google+.
Then you wait in breathless anticipation for your share count to skyrocket. Except it doesn’t.
Never fear, in this article you’ll find fresh ideas to generate buzz and get your posts noticed.
Use a two-pronged approach with a variety of platforms and different types of media to get your post shared. Image source: iStockPhoto.
Promote Your Article Across a “Wider” Variety of Platforms
Everyone is using Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn to promote their content. It’s tempting to focus only on these four networks because they have popularity and community numbers on their side.
