It can be difficult to grow a social media marketing campaign with only a few social communities. You really need to expand from Facebook and MySpace (because these are very general networks). You need to be able to start participating in niche communities and drive targeted traffic from these. Keeping up with a large number of social networking communities can be difficult and tracking your social media marketing efforts across them all can be impossible without a consistent strategy.
When I started social media marketing I found it difficult to keep track of my usernames and profiles so I developed a simple system using Google. I start by opening a Gmail account for a username that I intend to use for all of my social sites (make sure its something unique that you probably will be available in every social networking community you join). Then I sign up for every networking community with that email address and filter my emails in Gmail to keep emails coming from those different networks separate.
I also open a Google Docs account and keep the usernames, passwords and email for each account listed in a simple spreadsheet or document there. Finally I’ll start a blogger account and post to it occasionally. I do this so that I have central place to link back to from all of my community profiles.
Your online social networks can be more than just your customers, though. They may become your internet marketing JV partners or internet marketing affiliates or just promote you to their own networds as you gain influence. Never, ever spam the social sites you participate in. This will undermine your social media marketing efforts. These people could bring you a lot of internet marketing revenue in the long term. You have to listen to the conversations that are going on. Manipulating conversations could even get you banned and undo and hard work you’ve done.
Social media marketing is fast and builds momentum for your business. Short frequent status updates, possibly including embedded links where appropriate, can allow you to update your market more regularly than you can even update your lists. You can also receive feedback just as fast and get ideas and contributions to your internet marketing efforts from like minded associates. Forming alliances and friendships on these social networking sites (even where there is no intention of marketing to them) is very good.