This document provides tips for using social media for marketing success. It recommends engaging customers by understanding their needs and listening to them on social media. Build your business network on social media to gain new connections and resources. Identify enthusiastic customers as brand ambassadors and "cheerleaders" to promote your business through their social networks. Continually create and share new content across multiple social media platforms like events, videos and customer interactions to gain exposure and new customers. Understand what motivates people to share content by appealing to their desire to look knowledgeable, triggering emotions or memories, and aligning with their social interests and networks.

1. Marketing With
Social Media
Easy Tips to Success for
Business

2. It is Not About You and I. It Is About
“Us”
Engage your customers
Get your customers interested in what you
have to offer. What problem do they need to
fix, what need do they want to fulfill, what
desires do they have that are not being met?
Wearing a “customer’s hat” to see how they
want to be treated.

3. Listen to your customers
By talking and listening to your customers and
prospects you will get a feel for what it is they
really want from your product or service. By
using the social media sites where they
hangout, you have an easy set of tools at your
disposal to be able to listen effectively.

4. Build your business network
Building your business network of connections
will give you tentacles in all sorts of different
industries and places: you may never know
how and when you will use them, but they are
there for you. It doesn’t always work out quite
that easily, but I know that without a great
connection base, I wouldn’t have the same
resources to make use of from time to time.

5. Find your cheerleaders
You will have customers and clients who
absolutely love what it is you do — they
couldn’t be happier with your product or
service. If someone has been a cheerleader of
yours without you realizing it, do something
special for them. Make them cheer some
more, and maybe they will shout about you
and your brand more than they already do,
including online where they hangout.

6. Do it all over and over again, like Giapo did
There is always something going on Giapo Ice
Cream shop, whether it be karaoke, ice-cream
tasting or even organised runs around the
CBD. The message is relayed back and forth
through the online social media space for
massive exposure, such as Twitter, Facebook
and Youtube.

7. You can even shoot a quick video while still in
the store and upload it to YouTube for your
mates to see. Talk about getting others to
promote your brand for you and become your
buzzer! They also encourage customers to
bring in fruit from their gardens that have not
been sprayed with any nasty chemicals, and
he will pay you in ‘Giapo dollars’ or ice cream.

8. Content: What Makes People Share?
Social currency
People love to share things that make them
look good. They like to look smart, funny and
in the know. That might be by using
gamification (making something game-like) or
by being the first to have seen a video or to
answer a question. That feeling of a little
smugness, I suppose, and we are probably all
guilty of it at some time.

9. Triggers
What is it that makes people think about your
product or idea? Are you a pizza restaurant
and Saturday night reminds people that it’s
pizza night? Or how about when you have
your morning coffee you think about having a
KitKat? Saturday and coffee are both triggers
in these cases.

10. Emotion
When we care, we share. Think of all the
YouTube videos or images you have shared in
the past and look at what it was that made
you share them. No doubt there will have
been an emotion involved. Whatever it was, it
altered your pulse rate, which in turn makes
you inevitably pass it on. What can fire people
up about your product or service?

11. Social Technographic

12. Last but not least, it would be favorable for
your brand whether you know who is your
target market. It is good if you do a research
to know them deeper and find out who are
standing as creators and critics. Engaging and
caring them could help your brand to advance
exposure and gain awareness.
Source:
Coles, Linda. 2011. Marketing With Social Media.: 10 Steps to
Success for Business. Milton Qld: John Wiley and Sons.