Marketing With Social Media: Using Leverage In Your Social Media Marketing
Strategies for marketing with social media are fairly common. Unfortunately, high quality strategies are few and far between. As an author an online marketer, I have every reason to use leverage in my daily marketing activity. Well-meaning contractors abound on crowd sourcing sites such as Fiverr, but their tactics often leave something to be desired. Some can even hurt your business.
If you’re looking for leverage in your social marketing efforts, there are a few steps you can take that will dramatically improve your efforts without impacting your schedule.
The first thing to do is get a Posterous.com account. Posterous is great – it’s free and extremely powerful. Your account comes with a hosted blog, which is always a plus. But the reason to use Posterous is that it is the ultimate in social media marketing leverage. You can create blog posts by email and distribute them to your entire network of Web 2.0 properties. This includes other blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a complete array of top social networking sites.
If you don’t have an account, you can set one up yourself. There’s no need to hire a contractor or have your assistant get you through this. In fact, handing off this task would take longer than doing it yourself. It’s really easy to do, and it’s quick.
Choose a user name that relates to your business or area of expertise. This user name will be the name of your Posterous blog, the URL for that blog, and the email address you use for posting content remotely to your blog.
For example, let’s just say I have a blog called Marketing Power. I don’t really, but let’s say that I do. The fictitious URL for that blog on Posterous would likely be something such as <a target=”_new” rel=”nofollow” href=”http://marketing-power.posterous.com”>http://marketing-power.posterous.com</a>. The fictitious email address would be <a href=”mailto:marketing-power@posterous.com”>marketing-power@posterous.com</a>. Do you see how your user name gives you leverage here? The next time you want to dispense advice to a customer or client by email, simply cc them. Address the email itself to your Posterous account, and will post to your blog. Now you’ve got a marketing asset that you can refer to in the future again and again, as well as backlinks and eyeballs on your intellectual property.
The next thing to leverage when marketing with social media is to link your Posterous account to your other social networks such as Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. This creates a feed to these social sites, and your content will automatically be published, posted and tweeted.
Here’s what that looks like. If I send an email to my Posterous blog from my regular email account, my email will post as content on the blog. The subject line will serve as the article title. Everything I write in the email will be posted, including photos, so it’s important to include only the material I want to publish. The content is then re-posted on my other social sites that I’ve linked to my Posterous account.
The thing is, once I’ve taken the 3 minutes to get set up on Posterous, working this way doesn’t take any extra time at all. The only thing I’ve changed in my work flow is the addressee on the email. I’ve moved my client’s email address to the cc line. See? Leverage.
You can have more than one “space” on your Posterous account. In addition to Mind Power, I have spaces for Leadership and Success, Local Business Tips, and Wordcraft. These all correspond with the topics of my published books and audios, currently selling on the top online retail sites. Using Posterous allows me to publicize my work and help more people.
Give a little consideration to how you’d like to use this social marketing strategy for your own efforts. If you’re planning to do marketing with social media, there is magic in using this strategy. Google loves to see open-ended link wheels with high quality content. If each of your web 2.0 properties is tightly focused on a specific topic, adding content regularly will only help your ranking in the search engines. Adding a touch of leverage will help your social marketing process run smoothly – and get your content noticed.
