Social Media Marketing 101 News & Articles

In 2011, social media marketing not only was a sum of its individual parts, but also a force to be reckoned with as far as social business initiatives were concerned. Let’s take a stroll down social media marketing lane, shall we?

After seven weeks, our social media marketing 101 series comes to a close. While I’ve enjoyed outlining the script to help you write your organization’s narrative online, I know there is much I didn’t discuss, of which another seven weeks could cover. However, for brevity’s sake, I offer a few last-minute tips, tricks and final thoughts about this thing called social media marketing.

If you’ve gotten through this far in our social media marketing 101 series, you are well on your way to developing and implementing a social media marketing strategy. Yet, for as much time spent on defining your identity, audience and messaging, the time spent developing the policies that govern your social presence should also be as well-thought-out.

While this series has been about social media marketing, we haven’t talked much about the actual social media channels you can use to spread your message, engage your users and amplify your brand. Until now.

We’re half way through our social media marketing 101 series and it’s a perfect time to talk about what it really means to be social. The elements of social media marketing come down to three basic actions: sharing, collaborating and connecting.

As we enter the fourth week in our Social Media Marketing 101 series, we’ve already outlined a lot of the basic details necessary for developing an effective social media marketing strategy. Now that you know who you are, what you do and the right keywords to use to describe your brand/company/product, as well as the appropriate goals you hope to achieve with and for your customers, it’s time to figure out a way to manage it all.

Social media can be very exciting. For companies who are brave enough to embrace social media and integrate engagement within their communication and marketing strategies, the most daunting part is measuring its impact on the bottom line. And lest you think that you need to be a seasoned marketing professional to really know how to measure social media engagement, think again – it’s something everyone struggles with.

Last week, we helped you define your identity. Today, we seek to give our identity the words it needs to thrive in the marketplace. The way we says things, where we say it and to whom we say it can be the difference between shouting our message blindly from the rooftops or whispering it to an empty room. Ideally, we aim to be somewhere in the middle, talking in our own voice, conversationally to a room full of interested people.

Starting in January 2012, I will be assuming the role of adjunct faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Md., where I will be teaching Social Media Marketing as a part of its new Business of Art and Design program. The program aims to provide a comprehensive, highly concentrated education in business management specifically for artists, designers and related professions. Lest you think that artists and other creatives are the only ones in need of social media marketing 101, I’ve decide to adapt my eight-week course into a weekly column addressing social media marketing for the enterprise.