Hey Marketers! Social Media is alright but…
A couple weeks ago, I gave two lectures at Charlotte BarCamp. The titles were “How to Make Money Online” and “How to Market Anything Online”.
In doing so, one statement seemed to get the most attention. Heads turned when that I told everyone that if you are just doing Social Media, you are missing out.
The ease and quickness of posting something on Twitter and Facebook has gotten many marketers and business owners to get lazy. They forget about the real opportunities that exist on the Internet for gaining attention.
NOTE: People use Twitter and Facebook for all kinds of reasons. If you just use them personally, that’s fine. But if you are a business owner and/or a marketer, you need to consider the below.
1. Blogging
If you have a huge following on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t own your own blog, you’re crazy. Putting all your content on those two platforms and not owning it just doesn’t make sense.
Take the time to buy a domain name, obtain hosting, and learn WordPress. Then, when creating content, do it on your own site with your own RSS feed.
If you’re smart, you’ll feed that content to all your Social Media profiles in a way that is automated, yet appropriate.
Drive social media traffic to your blog, not the other way around.
Own the platform. Own the images and advertising around your content.
Don’t just do social media.
2. Email Newsletter
If you assume that email doesn’t work anymore, you clearly are not paying attention. At a minimum, you should test that assumption.
Last I noticed, Facebook had almost 400 million users. Twitter has almost 100 million accounts.
How many people use email? EVERYONE! We don’t even count them. It’s a good assumption that every potential customer you want uses email. You probably can’t say that about Facebook, and certainly not Twitter
And think about the differences. When you post on Facebook or Twitter, will your followers get that message? Maybe.
An email will almost always reach their inbox and sit there until they look at it (which most everyone does every day now).
So take a look at your website(s). Do you have Twitter and Facebook badges on it? Do you encourage people to retweet what you write?
How about asking them to sign up for your newsletter?
Think about it. Don’t just do social media.
PS: You can sign up for my newsletter here.
(I just had to add that. You knew it was coming, right?)