The perfect platform for businesses to market their products and services online. This media realm is based on building connections and relationships with people who resonate with you. Then it can be used to market your products and services in a conversational way like we use to in times past when everyone gathered together on the front porch on Sunday afternoon to talk about their week.

Business owners everywhere are ready to figure out what their next marketing action step is. Disappointed and feeling frustrated with ineffective pages of print that only worked in the past. They want answers and need them now. With some knowledge, you too can take your enterprise and compete with the “Big Boys” or anyone else online for that matter. This is one time where “Size Doesn’t Matter.”

Time marches on and you either get going and learn new things or you miss the golden opportunity to be recognized as a go-to or expert for you profession or industry.

Don’t worry you won’t be sitting around reading about other people’s exploits or what they are eating,drinking, or doing unless you choose to. There is so much more to social media. It seems like the entire world is trying to take the plunge. Some business are touching their toes in to the waters while other dive right in. Either way I think you will find these 5 Critical Steps eye opening as well as helpful to your success. So what are the steps?

• Step 1 – Your Target Market. This is the most important steps for any marketing plan. Many business owners and entrepreneurs say anyone and everyone are their best customers. You need to be more specific. The more laser focused you become the quicker results arrive. Even if your company is well established, pinpoint who your ideal client is.
• Step 2 – Once you find that hungry crowd they will want what you have. What irritation itch or problem can you solve? What solutions do you have that they need? What pain or struggle is it that you can fix? Knowing this will guide you to the most effective way to providing answers to their burning questions.
• Step 3 – Content is important. You know your product or service best. In social marketing you have the opportunity to educate. Make people aware. Having said that you don’t just go online and push for a sale. Over the course of time people get to know you, trust you and of course choose to use you product or service.This is where you need to set aside your old ways of thinking. Friends and fans get to tell the world or anyone in their circle how great you and your company are. Word of mouth plays a vital role in your success. Social media takes it from a single handshake multiplies it many times over in an instant.
• Step 4 - Keywords can make the difference. Go to Google. Use the Keyword tool and look up the exact words that you need to use in your profile and content. It only takes a few minutes. Keep a list of these handy. If you still don’t find you have the time you can always hire an expert to do it for you.
• Step 5 - Join several social media sites Facebook, Twitter, Linked In. This is touching your toes to the water. Complete your profile, add your picture. Make sure your photo is acceptable in the business arena. Save the one of you drinking a beer for later.

This is just the beginning of what it takes to be connected to your local neighborhood and beyond. In no time you will be in the homes, offices and cell phones of your community. I’ll look forward to seeing you there.

This guide will offer substantial suggestions for developing a practical approach to measure your social media marketing return on investment (ROI).

You begin by posting to Facebook and Twitter to interact with your fans and followers. You think your actions are OK, but are not sure how to determine the impact of your efforts and the ROI.

Counting how many Twitter followers and Facebook fans you have is a way to jump in and start measuring your ROI. A slightly more advanced method is to measure Facebook likes and Twitter retweets. A better approach to ROI measurement that is goal-based will help you understand the “how” behind the “why” of the marketing initiatives you implement.

Many internet marketers will focus on acquiring contacts first, strengthening their brand, then how to create more sales. Any return on investment in social media marketing should be tied in with the goal of your social media messages and your presence online.

Survey Results

A typical purchasing process starts with becoming aware of a brand, then showing enough interest to become a contact, and finally, deciding to make a purchase.

Step One – Strengthen Your Brand

The total of all social interactions regarding your product drives your brands’ success. You need other people talking about you and your products with their networks so these interactions do not just involve your efforts alone.

Attention

Attention revolves around the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Potential customers have to be engaged with your brand. It is not sufficient to just have a large group of social media followers.

Reach

When you engage in social media, how many people can you reach to interact with? Your reach will grow as people want to hear more if you offer content that interests people and gets noticed. Marketers claim it is analogous to your brand reach which will be equal to your email marketing list size.

Every piece of your content posted should be so good your fans and followers will want to share it with their friends which is known as viral marketing. More people see your content when they do this.

Engagement

What your audience is saying about your brand is known as brand engagement. Engagement includes both content engagement and brand engagement.

Content

One way to measure content engagement is by measuring social media shares (i.e., likes or retweets) which shows how engaged your audience is with your content. If your content clicks with your audience you can better understand the level of your content engagement. In an example, were your visitors connected with your content well enough to share it with their group of friends?

Step Two – Acquire Contacts

Understanding your list of social media followers is critical. Measuring the growth in brand reach is a common way to accomplish this. It is likewise important you understand how all of your actions may affect the reach of your brand. A table or line graph are common tools to help you measure this.

Your actions have an impact on the resulting count of your Twitter followers.

Your latest product release and asking people for product feedback probably increased your Twitter follower count after sharing content about the product. Ideally, the type of content you publish and the subject matter resonated with visitors enough to push them past their inertia point so they will click the Twitter follow button.

It is not just how you say it and what you say on Twitter and Facebook that assists growing your following. The key is to analyze your overall social media actions and then tie them to the goal you are intending to achieve.

One example is, both your email and website contain valuable content; by including social sharing toolbars to both of them, it can increase the number of touch points available for visiting followers and fans.

Step Three – Generate Sales

How do you transform your visitors and contacts into revenue once you have an audience built from your hard work? The usual marketer desires to drive quantifiable results so their time investment is justified, but they remain difficult to measure entirely.

There are some things you can do to measure if your efforts are delivering results.

• Surveys – Survey your customers is one way to measure if your social media efforts had any impact on them. Ask which of your efforts added to their purchasing process.

• Social Media-Specific Offers – A second idea is to create a special offer or specific landing pages to promote via just your social media marketing. Using these pages you can track actions and traffic as these pages are specifically aimed to your social media efforts.

• Google Analytics – One can create social media-specific campaigns and tag those links and campaigns if you use Google Analytics, which is a free download for you. This can analyze how many visitors came from a social media source to visit a particular landing page.

• Different Links – To determine your traffic sources more accurately, employ different links in your social media for tracking information. As an example, use a different link for your Facebook post than the one you use for a Twitter tweet to determine which media source your traffic came from.

Other solutions can include engaging browser cookies to track the source from where a purchaser clicked a link and from which social media posting. If you want other methods to track your results you can research more solutions in a Google search.

Step Four – Gain Community Participants

If you’ve done all the above steps adequately, you should see your social media presence growing each week. Some revenues may be showing up now from your actions. How does one boost it up to the next level then?

In the world of social media, there is a neat trick called viral marketing which is having your friends, followers and contacts pass information or tweets about you and your products along to their friends’ social pages. This acts to distribute notice of your brand for you.

Conclusion

Your goals in social media marketing are tied to the purchasing process, which involves acquiring contacts first, then promoting your brand, eventually creating sales, and gaining brand followers. Whichever goal you have, to evaluate your social marketing efforts’ ROI, it’s important to use a goal-based approach. One will not know whether their social media campaign is working for them until they completely understand their final objective.