3. Expand your social networks, Listen, contribute, participate

Traditional broadcast or push based marketing is on a downward spiral and is making way for community or social marketing. Companies now prefer investing more time in building credibility and trust among their target customer base by operating within the community rather than outside it. The question most marketers are trying to deal with is how to use Social Media Marketing to increase Brand Awareness ?

There are a variety of social networks that people and communities use. These could range from tools like Facebook for sharing with friends, colleagues, LinkedIn for professional networking, Twitter for mico-blogging and various other tools.

The number of twitter followers or facebook likes or LinkedIn contacts that you have determine your direct reach. Here are some simple ‘karmas’ that you can resort to in order to increase your social media tribe. These channels that you set up, when built well can be the conduit for making your content available across a large number of people in your target community.

More info about this in our ebook – Expanding your social networks . You can plan to propagate a lot of the content that you generate like white papers, ebooks, blogs, articles, PR via your social networks. Also understand how you plan for a content dashboard

1. Twitter ‘karmas’

• Play by the rules, do not spam or try to contact people directly with marketing messages
• Retweet good and relevant content that you feel is useful to your followers and target community
• Thank people for following you and for Retweeting your tweets. You are dealing with real people here, Be polite and gentle
• Use hash tags effectively, where appropriate

2. Blog Karmas

• Follow blogs of thought leaders in your field. Make comments, contribute and reach out to these thought leaders to build backlinks to your site
• Blog regularly about topics that will be of interest to your target market community

3. LinkedIn ‘karmas’

• Participate in groups, where you feel your target market resides and where you can make a valuable contribution and help others. Increase your LinkedIn connections, build trust and confidence
• Use the status updates option intelligently to attract attention of your contacts to content that you propagate. Do not always resort to self-promotion. This ensures that you are topical and are not just a sales maniac. Comment/ voice your opinion on topics that matter to you and your audience.
• Participate in LinkedIn Q&A, make sure that your experience counts.

A Summary of this series of blogs

1. So Marketing has changed! Time to stop complaining & leverage the change – 5 easy steps – This is where we summarize what has changed in marketing and how you can systematically plan to leverage the change.
2. Invest in content marketing to build thought leadership and a strong following – Content marketing is like any other project. Plan it well and create fantastic content that can then be leveraged in different campaigns that you plan to run
3. Expand your social networks, Listen, contribute, participate – Social networks offer you a great potential to manage viral marketing. It also offers you the capability of reaching a larger (& right) target audience very efficiently.
4. Publish content, be useful to your target audience – Having created content, make sure that you propagate it well across your various channels. Re-purpose content, cross-promote and analyze your efforts regularly
5. Measure, Analyze, Track and take decisions – No matter which channel you use to propagate your content, measure, analyze and track to take meaningful decisions. If thing are not working, change them in real time
6. Build and nurture leads – Nurture relationships with potential prospects till they are ready to do business with you.

I hope this post was able to give you some ideas about using Social Media Marketing to increase Brand Awareness