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Like with every other
project or when selling a product, your social media campaign
does not function if you do not promote it. Even if people are
looking for your product or company, the chance is that there
are already so many sites out there with similar names or
content, that you will not automatically appear in Google. So
how do you get people to start paying attention to you?
SEO
The first thing you need to do is good old fashioned Search
Engine Optimization. This means whatever your campaign is about,
make sure that it has good content which changes frequently.
Based on your research (see Social media: the first step) you
know what your customers are interested in. Realize a regular
update on these subjects and submit those to the large search
engines regularly.
The second way to improve your ranking in search engines is by
other websites linking to yours. This means other people or
organizations are interested in you and thus you are interesting
to Google. The more links you can realize towards your site the
higher you will rank. There are different ways to get links to
your site, like you can negotiate with other organizations to
link to each others site, or promote it through a PR campaign.
The best way is to engage in blogs that write about your type of
product or service. This way you can create a link in every
remark you make and show your potential customers that you are
highly involved in the subject.
Twitter
Another way to promote your campaign to your customers is to use
Twitter. Twitter is an excellent tool to communicate with your
customers and shows you what your customers care about. If your
followers on Twitter re-tweet you, they will not only spread the
word, but also link back to your campaign and thus create more
links to improve your search ranking.
A Twitter account will also enable you to stay in contact with
your peers, which will keep you up to date of the latest
developments in your area, so you can adapt your social media
campaign where necessary.
YouTube
Being the second largest search engine in the world, you can
hardly ignore YouTube. With its visual aspect YouTube is more
attractive than a website with text and people tend to remember
visual messages better than written ones. Nowadays the costs for
a video are low and often people prefer amateur shots over ones
that clearly have been made by a professional organization. The
former ones appear more realistic and authentic and are thus
easily accepted.
Word of mouth
But no matter what you do to promote your campaign, in the end
it all comes down to customer satisfaction: Are you delivering
the right service to your customers in your campaign? Are you
listening to your customers? Do you react enough to your
customers questions and complaints?
If your product or service is good enough and your social media
campaign does satisfy your customer with its contents and
reactions to their comments, then word of mouth will do the rest
and promote your social media campaign for you.
On the other hand, if it doesn’t, social media will kill both
your campaign and your product in no time.
Time
No matter what the outcome of the former paragraph will be, be
aware your campaign will need a lot of investment (either in
your time or in money for third parties) and it will take time
to get going. Building up a relevant group of
followers/customers with your campaign does not happen overnight
and even SEO will need a couple of months to start getting any
visible effect. After that you will need to invest an equal
amount of work to keep the campaign going. Do realize: Once you
started with social media you have to go on.
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