Promote Business through Social Media

The Older way of marketing is famous 4 P's:
1. Create a Product.
2. Figure out how to price it?
3. Placed in the market.
4. Promote the product.

Product - Price - Placement - Promotion

Today's approach to marketing, the approach infused with social media, leans much more heavily on the 4 Cs of marketing:
1. User generated Content.
2. Content is delivered in a Context that makes it useful for people.
3. Make Connections with people, products and brands.
4. Build a Community around.

Content - Context - Connection - Community = Social Media Marketing

An integrated social media strategy
It's important to have a new media strategy attached to your new media tactics-or you'll find yourself running around in circles and left with a sense that all this online networking stuff is a big fat waste of time.

Here are some worthy marketing objectives where new media tactics can excel:

- Do you want to spread your content and expertise to new audiences?
- Do you want to network with like-minded individuals and companies?
- Do you want to build a community of evangelists?
- Do you want to involve your customers and prospects in co-creation?
- Do you want to automate the process of repurposing content?
- Do you want to reach new audiences in the exact way they choose to communicate?
- Do you want to be seen as a thought leader in your industry?
- Do you want ways to aggregate and filter content so you and your people can digest it?
- Do you want to easily hear literally everything that's being said online about your brand,
products, or industry in real time?
- Do you want to be seen as a trusted source of information?

The best way to look at social media is to view it as a way to open up new access points. These points can then be leveraged to create content, context, connection, and community. Do that well, and they can also add to lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. And that's the
payoff of social media. But get the order wrong, get the interaction wrong, get the participation wrong-and you may never see much return on the time you invest. Social media conversations are just that-open, honest, transparent conversations, not sales
pitches or shouting festivals.

One of the things that small-business marketers struggle with around the entire topic of social marketing is trying to jump into the next new thing without enough analysis of what they should focus on.

Most small-business owners should look at the following progression or hierarchy as they move deeper into social-marketing tactics. So, jump in, but do it in this order and don't move on until you have the basics of each stage down and working for you.

1. Blogging
Blogging is the foundation of Pyramid. Blogging can help each core fragment of what makes up a successful and viable company. The core needs for any business are as follows:
- Decent ideas
- A great product
- Visibility
- A well-trained team of people who work hard to make the company succeed
You also need good marketing, great customer relations, an awesome sales force, decent customer support, and a host of other factors. But if you have ideas, a product worth selling, a solid team behind it, and potential customers, the rest will follow naturally.

Read Blogs, Comment on Blogs. This is the doorway to all other Social Marketing.

2. RSS
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter.

Aggregate and filter content around subjects and use RSS technology as a tool to help you as a repurpose, republish and create content.

3. Social Search
What is Social Search?
This refers to social networks playing an increasing role in determining which web pages rank higher than others. So say that your friend Steve "likes" a certain local restaurant near you. When you are searching online for a local place to eat out, you see that Steve is a fan of that restaurant in particular.

This is a pretty simplistic example, but the implication is that you'll appreciate learning that your friend Steve likes the page of this restaurant because it's like a personal recommendation without your even having to consult your friend first, it's right there for you.

This means that whether you have an online or offline business, you need to get on the major social networks and establish a page for your website or business on there which people can like. It's not only another outlet for the exposure of your site or business, but as you can tell, social searching continue to play a stronger role in the traditional realm of SEO.

4.Social Bookmarking
Tagging content to and participating in social bookmarking communities can be a great way to open up more channels to your business as well as generate extra search traffic. But it takes work.

5. Social Networks
Branching out to take advantage of the numbers of potential prospects that you might find in sites such as Facebook or MySpace will frustrate, at least as a business tool, if you don't have many of the above needs met. These networks take time to understand and thrive on ideas and content. You've got to have much to share if you wish to build a business case.

6. Micro
Platforms such as Twitter, Thwirl, Plurk, and FriendFeed have become a very important part of the social media mix as they allow for quick tracking, joining, and engagement. However, they still reside at the top of the pyramid because without content, such as that created on a blog, the engagement on Twitter may not go very deep.