Facebook and Twitter Social Media Marketing Strategies

Social media marketing is the fastest rising strategy in making your product, brand or business known all over the World Wide Web. With the many people using it and the many things people claim, people start to wonder what the right way to start implementing this strategy is. This guide will focus mainly on the king of kings of social media namely Facebook and Twitter.


Facebook
Facebook, the internationally recognized number one social networking site offers small businesses excellent, cost-friendly marketing opportunities. Facebook offers 300 million users to exploit. Despite the huge population, Facebook has devised as very powerful marketing platform that can pinpoint our target audience in building up your web presence.


Basic Strategy
Sign up for Facebook if you do not have an account yet. You can not make use of its marketing platform for your social media marketing campaign if are not one of its members. After signing up with your own name, also sign up for your company’s own account.

Be conscious, however, that if you preserve your company name for your individual account, you will not be capable of utilizing it for your Business Fan Page, so you may opt to make a Page prior to registering your company’s name. Remember that Fan Pages have special rules regarding usernames.


After setting up accounts and pages, the next thing to do is to check out your competition. Do a Facebook search of your competitors and make an evaluation of their presence. What types of Pages have they built? How many fans or “friends” do they have? Spend at least 15 minutes per competitor in looking at their posts, photos and/or videos to understand how they’re using Facebook. Examine the strengths and weaknesses of their social media marketing campaigns and try to synergize. Combine their strengths while eliminating as much of their weaknesses as possible.


Advanced Strategy
While having your own personal account on Facebook, you may also register a business account for a little more presence. Such account though, may not be able to provide significant benefits especially due to the fact that Facebook imposes many limitations on such Business Accounts. Having a Business Fan Page is far better than having a Business Account. A business fan page is a page where customers or fans of your business or product can register as a fan. Every fan increases your web presence because your updates will become visible on their page or wall. You may also desire to think about running hyper-local ads on Facebook.


Twitter
Twitter is recognized worldwide as the number one social bookmarking site. It has showcased epic growth over the past year alone. Just like Facebook, it can serve as an amazing social media marketing platform for small and startup businesses.


Basic Strategy
Get a Twitter account now if you do not have one yet, and also reserve an account under your business name. Although you can easily twit in your own name, but having the alternative to twit in your business name may come in handy. The more important part is, you will be able to prevent competitors from registering your business name. Take the time to read the simple guide Twitter developed to help users make the most of Twitter for their business.


The next step is to allocate a few minutes exploring the Twitter homepage, making searches to be able to obtain a grasp of the kind of content available on the service. Let’s say for example that you are the owner of a small souvenir giveaway business, conduct some searches for various terms, phrases and keywords like “souvenir giveaway,” “souvenirs,” “souvenir business,” “souvenir giveaway business,” etc. also search for the names of your competitors to determine if they are already on Twitter, and if they are, how they are making use of it. After that search for your small business name, who knows, there may be some who already converse about you. After you feel comfortable with the available content and the means of how your competitors use Twitter, you can start on your strategy on how to use Twitter to establish web presence for your business.


Advanced Strategy
To be able to make full use of Twitter you also need to be able to efficienly use the more advanced Twitter tools like desktop and mobile Twitter clients like TweetDeck (TweetDeck), Seesmic (Seesmic), and Tweetie (tweetie). Desktop clients provide more flexibility and desktop access than the Twitter website. You can also do all sorts of things on Twitter straight from your desktop. Among other things, you’ll be able to pre-define searches and group people you follow so that you can minimize the noise and focus on the real content. You might also consider using a web tool like Twitterfall, which will allow you to define and color-code various custom searches that you can review from time to time, and also to follow trending topics.