Social media marketing platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz provide big opportunities for you and your employees to raise your company’s profile in a very positive way. This looks to be a rather long-term trend, so you might as well get in on it now. Maybe you’ll be the first in your niche!

Start by “listening” to the latest chatter about your niche or product. Use tools like Social Media Firehose to aggregate the latest and greatest about a product or niche (see screen shots for aggregating chatter about the topic “Nexus One phone.”). Once you have a sense of the general conversational climate, create accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, build up a community, and start interacting. At first, it’s a good idea to listen more than you talk. Start small, by commenting on blogs, doing the occasional re-tweet, or announcing something going on with your company, like a sale. Gradually increase your interaction until you have a real conversation with the customer community going on. It’s amazing the things you’ll learn.

Social media marketing is basically a 21st century version of word of mouth advertising that goes much faster than it does in the face-to-face community. It’s a chance to build your brand and shape your reputation for the long haul, so don’t miss out or let your competition take all the social media love that’s out there.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Social Media, internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.