Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote and grow your business. Social media has changed the way businesses and customers connect with each other. It forms an integral part of a successful Internet Marketing strategy today.

There are many ways how you can start using social media for your business. However before you start, it is important to understand the fundamental differences between social media marketing and traditional forms of direct advertising. In order to benefit fully from social media, a business first has to devote time and effort into building credibility and influence. This is achieved, not via direct promotion, but by sharing a wide range of information that is useful and valuable for the targeted audience.

In the short term, Businesses can benefit  by driving traffic to their website or blog and getting direct exposure for their brand. However once a business has built its credibility and influence on social media, the benefits of social media can be priceless.

Social media is believed to impact nearly 90% of purchases on the web today. Following are 60 practical social media marketing tips for business. I have divided the tips into broad areas for ease of reading.

Social Media Marketing Tips – Blogging and Content Creation

1. Social media is about sharing information and there is no better way to do this than a blog. Blogs are at the centre of most successful social media strategy. Start your blog today if you haven’t already done so. For best SEO results, host a WordPress blog on your domain name.

2. Schedule your blog posts for best results. I find it useful to publish new posts every morning to ensure it is delivered to my subscribers at the start of the day.

3. Internet marketing is largely content driven. Write quality content with your readers in mind and don’t make the mistake of writing content purely to attract search engines.

4. Publish frequently on your blog. Sharing new content from your blog on social media offers the ideal opportunity to stay active on various social networks you use.

5. Make it easy for your visitors to share your content on social media sites. Include a “share” button on your site to allow visitors to share content on social networks. Include this on all your web pages, blog posts as well as your RSS feed. Consider using individual links for leading social networks for improved results.

6. In addition to your main blog, build blogs on leading free hosted platforms such as blogger, tumblr or wordpress.com. You can automatically syndicate content from your self-hosted blog to save time.

7. Learn how to use tags on your posts and social media postings. Tags act as keywords on social media.

8. Keep a close watch on who comments on your blog or links back to you. Reciprocate by commenting on their blog or following them on social media. It will not go un-noticed and help build a stronger network.

9. Create a podcast about your products or services and publish it on your blog and podcast directories and share it on social media and other external websites.

10. If you are not comfortable with recording your own podcasts, you can get started by using free tools to convert existing posts or articles into podcasts.

Social Media Marketing Tips – Videos

11. According to a study by Informa, by 2015, video will be the largest online application. Tab into this market by converting your key articles or posts to videos using screen capture/presentation tools such as Snagit. Add them on various video sites and see how they attract new visitors.

12. Be active on YouTube. In addition to posting videos, enhance your presence by commenting on popular videos related to your industry. Your participation will not go un-noticed by Youtube’s large, active user-base.

13. Record a video about your product or interview a customer or a colleague. According to com Score, in the month of December alone, 178 million people watched 33.2 billion videos, with the average viewer watching 187 videos per month in the U.S. Creating videos will allow you to tap into this ever increasing audience.

You can use free tools such as ScreenR to record a video in minutes.

14. If you create videos to promote your site or products, create separate blog posts for every video. Add some text and embed your video in the post. You will attract a much larger audience than simply posting your video on You Tube.

15. Don’t limit your videos to You Tube. Submit it to other video sites including Vimeo. Try out shooting video interviews and video press releases and other bits of video to build more personable relationships.

16. Enable readers to subscribe to your blog updates by email. You can achieve this by adding your blog’s RSS feed to Google’s Feedburner tool. Feedburner also provides detailed statistics on subscribers.

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