© copyright 2015 silicon valley digital marketing ... · marketing. if you’re smart, you’ve...
TRANSCRIPT
© Copyright 2015 Silicon Valley Digital Marketing Institute, All Rights Reserved
© Copyright 2015 Silicon Valley Digital Marketing Institute, All Rights Reserved
Chapter #1: Introduction to Social Media
Social media is all around us, isn’t it? For example, I’m pretty sure
you check your personal Facebook and/or Twitter accounts from
your smartphone before you even get out of bed in the morning. In
addition, when you turn on your TV to watch the morning news it’s
all about #hashtag this and #hashtag that.
The power of social media is definitely no secret! Not only does it
allow you to communicate your voice to friends and associates who
also have a personal social media account that you are also using,
but rather it has become the dominant source of business
marketing.
If you’re smart, you’ve already started to integrate social media
into your business marketing plan. Whether you are a regular brick-
and-mortar location or even an online business, it’s easy to use
social media as your most dominant and least expensive medium to
© Copyright 2015 Silicon Valley Digital Marketing Institute, All Rights Reserved
attract fans. By doing so, you’ll be able to solid relationships with
both current and potential customers of your goods and services.
However, there might be many who have purchased this course
because they either haven’t started a social media marketing
campaign for their organization or they don’t know how to integrate
social media into their business. If you’re looking to learn the steps
of how to use social media to enhance your business’s profitability
and brand, you’ve purchased the perfect course.
Why Use Social Media? In case you’re not clear on the actual benefits of incorporating
social media into your business, let’s first cover some of the basics:
Social media helps you build a strong brand
In order to be successful in any business, it’s essential to stand out
from the crowd. People need to look at you and your products and
services and know exactly what you stand for. You also need to
create a spot in someone’s mind and subconscious.
© Copyright 2015 Silicon Valley Digital Marketing Institute, All Rights Reserved
In order to do this, you’ll need to have a strong background
utilizing social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
Pinterest, YouTube, etc., so that you can help people gain immediate
insight into what you’re all about and why it’s important that they
should follow you.
Just as an example, one way you can achieve this is through social
media updates which will consistently remind people of your brand.
This is even of greater effect if you’re sharing really “juicy”
information.
Social media helps you find new prospects
Perhaps the first benefit that most people think of when they
ponder about social media is finding new prospects. Social media
marketing (SSM) is not only a great way to find new prospects, fans
and followers, but you can also turn these same individuals into
buyers. Fortunately, social media channels have features that can
help us achieve this. For example, you can use Facebook advertising
to draw people through to your squeeze page and thus turn those
visitors into email subscribers and customers as they go through
your sales funnel.
© Copyright 2015 Silicon Valley Digital Marketing Institute, All Rights Reserved
SMM helps you to build a relationship with your audience
It’s not a secret that people are much more likely to buy from
somebody who they’ve developed a pre-existing relationship with.
When you think about it, how many times have YOU come across a
random website and bought a product from it immediately? This
hardly ever happens unless you’ve done things previously such as
checking out their blog, looking at their social media accounts as
well as their website a few times and perhaps even over a period of
days or weeks before you formed an opinion of the company or
service.
In simple terms, the typical customer has to build up a picture in
their mind of what that company is about before they’ll consider
buying something. Luckily, utilizing social media channels is one of
the best ways of building a relationship with your audience
You can use social media to share content which people in your
niche will find useful and interesting, thus positioning yourself as
an expert.
© Copyright 2015 Silicon Valley Digital Marketing Institute, All Rights Reserved
You’ll also have the ability to interact with your audience and have
conversations with them and as a result, you’ll build a relationship
of trust.
Social media allows you to connect with people who share the same interest
Networking is an essential function you need to be involved in when
you’re running any type of business. This is because connecting
with other people in your specific industry, niche or market can be
extremely useful. For starters, you can help each other out and give
advice to one another. In addition, you can consider promoting each
other’s products or forming some sort of joint venture where you
create and launch products or services online together.
As you build a connection, whether it is personal or online, you’ll
notice that over a period of time, these same people will become
your friends and support group. It’s amazing how inspiring it is to
connect with people who run similar businesses.
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Although you might be competitors to some degree (depending
upon which geographic location and demographic you serve), it’s a
wise idea not to treat these people as enemies but rather find
something that you can build upon and from time-to-time you may
even want to meet up and brainstorm with each other.
Social media helps you spy on the competition
On the other side of networking with people in your same industry,
niche or market, it’s important to note that many might not want to
form any sort of alliance with you and many times, they’ll be your
main competitor.
The great thing about social media is that it’s fairly transparent, and
that means that it’s great for spying on the competition. You can
learn so much just by watching how other people run their
businesses – and while I’m not telling you to steal other people’s
ideas, you definitely can “borrow” some of the ones you like and
then put your own spin on them. A great site for doing this is
Twitter; for example, you can observe things like the promotions.
promotions your competitors are running or the types of content
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They’re sharing.
SMM can enable you to provide better customer service
If you pay specific attention to any large company’s social media
campaign, you’ll see that this is something that even small scale
businesses are taking advantage of. We’ll show you how to do this
in later lessons.