Free Marketing: 101 Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business, Online and Off

PART 12

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

The real power of social media kicks in when you find a way to encourage your friends and followers to help you share your message with their own social circles of influence. Earlier in the book I talked about the megaphone that many of your prospects and customers have. Your success in social media is not so much reliant on your ability to use social media to connect with your current customer base, as much as it's reliant on your ability to do or produce something that is worthy of being shared and talked about.

You can also learn a great deal about how social media is being used by everyone from big corporations to small businesses by observing how companies like Starbucks and Dell are using Facebook and Twitter, as well as also paying attention to how it's being used by other small businesses in your niche.

Before hiring anyone to work on your behalf and represent you using social media, be sure to ask them some tough questions, such as who else they have worked with, as well as what success they've had. This is an emerging field, but you want to work with creative people that have a proven track record. What is their strategy to make you and your message shareable?