Many people think there is “secret” for developing the perfect social media plan; however, social media needs a well thought-out strategy with goals and tactics.  Social media marketing is widely successful for many companies and this Internet marketing company knows the importance of these seven steps below.

Source: SocialMediaToday

Social Media Plan

Do you dream about the perfect social media plan? The perfect social media template? Many business leaders wanting to get social dream about it.  They think they need it. The social media magic template. The one that includes the perfect strategy, tactics and themselves as the social hero of their company and social superstar of their market niche!

You know the social media template I am talking about.  The one that will help you see a positive return on investment where everything is measurable and justifiable to stakeholders. The one that will make the boss scream with delight and as a result enable you to keep your job or even get a promotion!

The question is does the perfect social media template or strategy for your business exist?

A perfect strategy or template, well probably not! A good template and structure, yes!

Do you want the answer? Are you ready for the top 7 tips to develop a social media strategy that will make your ROI zoom?

Here ya go…

Step 1: Do your own research on how to best leverage social media to meet business goals and objectives.

Step 2: Develop a business and integrated marketing plan inclusive of goals and objectives. Be sure to focus clearly on your target market segments with a goal of knowing them and getting in their head the best you possibly can.

Step 3: If you don’t have the skills and knowledge of social media internally, hire the agency or consultant to help you integrate social media into your business. Be sure that they understand integrated marketing, the importance of setting goals and objectives and can help you develop and execute a plan to meet yours! Refuse to accept a list of random acts of social media (RAMs). If the plan is not integrated then the RAMs will eat your ROI for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

Step 4: Integrate social media into your business plan with a focus on leveraging social media to support biz goals and objectives. Your business plan may need to be adjusted based upon your new findings and research of the social media landscape.

Step 5: Develop an integrated social media strategy, approach and plan that best supports your business goals and objectives.

Step 6: Execute the integrated marketing, social media and business plan.

Step 7: Continuously analyze, measure and refine your approach, strategies and tactics based upon achievement to goals and objectives.

Do you see any theme here peeps? There is no magic blue carpet tweet ride to skies of social ROI.

The best way to see results is to get focused, integrated and execute!

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This Internet marketing company understands the importance of incorporating social media marketing and search engine optimization.  By creating social media sites and incorporating keywords on social sites, it can help a company’s ranking with SEO. Learn more on how to properly use social media and SEO with the article below.

Source: Sitepronews

Social Media and SEO

There are numerous benefits to engaging in social media marketing. Some are tangible (number of Likes, Fans and followers) and some are not (enhanced customer service, brand recognition and developing lasting relationships). You may not fully “get” social media, but you can’t deny that it is important and should be included in your overall marketing campaign. Social media is here to stay, and it is up to you to make sure your company uses it to their best advantage.

SEO is another field of online marketing that has earned itself a permanent spot in the marketing campaigns of many companies. With millions of searches being conducted every day, a company that can’t be found in the search engines is practically invisible. SEO isn’t just about ranking well; it’s about building your online brand. There are many factors that affect how a site ranks in the search engines and SEO is about optimizing your site as best as possible to help it succeed.

However, SEO and social media marketing shouldn’t exist in separate silos. In truth, there should be an element of SEO in all of your online activities, as well as finding a way to leverage your offline marketing methods online. As social media marketing matures, it is becoming clearer and clearer that it has an impact on a site’s SEO.

Here are a few ways you can use your social media marketing activities to aid your SEO:

Create Social Networking Profiles

Aside from the big three of social media (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) there are literally hundreds of smaller social networking sites for every kind of audience. Each of these profiles has the potential to rank in the search engines, increasing your brand presence online. Keep in mind that you should only create profiles on sites that you actually intend to be involved with. While creating a profile to just get the link is okay, an active profile is going to be worth much more in the long run. Social networking sites are a great place to establish relationships with consumers and build a strong community.

Incorporate Keywords into Tweets and Posts

Twitter only gives you 140 characters, so space is limited. It is a great way to share a link to your blog, an article, video or any other form of content. Incorporating keywords into the Tweet (perhaps as a hash tag, stylized as #keyword) helps that Tweet get pulled into a results page by the search engines. On Facebook, you have more room to target keywords in your posts. The title of your post is a great place to incorporate keywords. You can also write a short description about the content of each post, another good spot to target keywords.

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As we all know, the Internet rapidly changes everyday, and the importance of an Internet Marketing Company is to consistently change with it.  What may be important for SEO on month, may be different for the next month.  One thing that  is certain is how social media has helped change and reshape Internet marketing.  Without social media, a brand lacks that genuine communication to its clients; however, with Single Throw your brand readily adapts with an ever-changing industry.

Source: The Next Web

Marketing is an ever-changing landscape, which we’ve seen with the rise and fall of SEO and the revolution of Inbound Marketing led by the guys over at HubSpot. Social Media has also become one of the big influencers in marketing, becoming an integral part in any successful business marketing strategy.

Here are some ways that Social Media has helped to reshape marketing.

Facebook and Twitter’s new influence on Search

With how ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ plus ‘retweets’ are becoming more and more important in getting the word out, the big search engines have started to realize that those public announcements are like a vote of confidence from the sharer. Permanent links were what all SEOs had dreamed about. Now, SEOs are hoping to get their links shared by influential tweeters, which are proving to influence search ranking factors. Here’s an unexpected case study on a tweet’s effect on rankings by SEOmoz Of course, there is more value than just the boost in search rankings from ‘likes’ and tweets. There is brand exposure and clicks, which also are valuable things in marketing. But there is no doubt that with the search industry continuing to grow, that Social Media should be an important part of any SEO strategy, what with the growing influence Social Media has on search rankings.

Companies Focus on Engagement versus Selling

Think about how back in the day we used to have our local dry cleaner who everyone in the family knew and who knew everyone in the family, the convenience store clerk who you talked to about your problems at work while he made your favorite cup of coffee, and the homely waitress at the local diner who knew how to get your eggs just right. Those were the days that were less about profit and transactions and were more about creating genuine, personal relationships. Businesses now, through Social Media, are working to reverse the effects time has had on the personal customer experience by engaging users to create more loyalty. It’s not unusual to get an @reply from a company saying thanks for sharing a neat tweet or even engaging in an intellectual or simply fun exchange with you.

Blogging to Build Influence and Authority

I was recently approached by the awesome Noah Kagan who asked about leveraging blogging to build influence and authority after seeing my name pop up in some of the bigger outlets in the startup space. An authority in the marketing realm himself, I was more than happy to oblige because I had much respect for the former Director of Marketing at Mint.com and current Chief Sumo at App Sumo. Wise professionals and marketers like him are continuing to understand the value in blogging. Both in the networking value because you become part of the writing community where other writers treat you as a peer, and in the authority you build, becoming an expert and influencer in the space you write about. I also had a recent chat with Scott Gerber, expert on young entrepreneurship, who is syndicated in outlets like Entrepreneur, WSJ, FoxNews and more. By blogging, he became one of the leading sources in everything about young entrepreneurship, and is constantly receiving inbound inquiries (perhaps more than he can handle) about what’s new in youth entrepreneurship.

Social Media as a New Distribution Channel

By using channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, you leverage your network, your second- and third-degree networks and heavily trafficked platforms for mass distribution because of the viral potential these channels have. Here’s an interesting study by ChompOn showing the  value of social action in online commerce. These days, it’s less about the stale press release, which is arguably dead, and more about empowering customer evangelists, who are more trusted referral sources in spreading the word. In fact, some businesses leverage Social Media to create hype or make announcements about exciting things they’re doing. The popular Robert Scoble played an integral role in helping to launch the awesome Flipboard app, which couldn’t support all the great hype it got during launch, but was able to rebound.

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An important part of internet marketing is consistently communicating with a client’s target market.  At Single Throw, we understand the significance of a blog as well as social networking.  A blog needs to engage its readers and be search engine friendly as well, just like the clients actual site.  These tips below can definitely make creating a blog run more effectively.

Source: Mashable

Lots of companies benefit from having a blog. For some, it’s a friendly, accessible way to say hi to devoted fans, curious onlookers and likely a few haters and skeptics. For others, it’s simply the way they communicate important messages. The role of public relations professionals in this chatty puzzle is to help companies build, shape and fine-tune their public voice. In fact, many PR campaigns aren’t complete without a blog strategy. But building a client blog from the ground up can be daunting. So where do you begin?

Start, With Help

When it comes to picking out a blog platform, there are certainly plenty to choose from, but Jeff Davis, who runs the content services team at San Francisco-based PR firm LaunchSquad, generally points clients towards WordPress, a mostly-free, open-source platform. Davis also makes another point: When you’re just starting out, don’t go DIY. “If you’re building something strategic for a client, even if it’s small scale, hire a WordPress developer to handle set up, find the right plugins and design a nice UI. It can be fairly inexpensive and is critical to building a blog that will work the way you need it to quickly and effectively.”

With a bit of help, WordPress’ initial set up process is simple and fast, and yet it offers a huge range of customization and configuration options. And with thousands of plugins, there is one that will satisfy any need that you can think of, often for free. For those who are coordinating blogs for multiple clients, WordPress also offers admin features for easy management across the board.

Optimize, But Not Too Much

According to Rich Brooks, President and “Chief Blogging Officer” at Flyte New Media, your SEO practices should have a very simple goal: rank high in search results for the things that your client’s customers are looking for. He recommends starting with a keyword analysis service like Raventools, WordTracker or Google Adwords’ keyword tool.

You want to pick one keyword topic per post, mentioning it once in the post title and once in the body of the post. Be sure to link important words to past posts as well, but keep it to one or two internal links at most. Beyond that, make sure you’ve got the WordPress SEO plugin installed and place the rest of your focus on working with your client to create engaging content.

Make It Worth Sharing

The company and product news that grace the vast majority of corporate blogs can certainly be both useful and good, but it’s just a tiny snippet of what is possible and inspiring. Arik Hanson, principal at ACH Communications, recommends considering content that is less about your client’s product, and more about the “culture that surrounds” your client’s product.

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Many companies understand the importance of its brand image, especially online; and more companies are turning towards online reputation management services to assist in how the brand is perceived online.  Negative comments tend to be posted more frequently, than positive ones; and Single Throw Internet Marketing is here to help a company RECOVER™ from such statement.  Enjoy this great article from Amsterdam Printing and how reputation management is a key tool in social media.

Source: AmsterdamPrinting

Small business marketing and advertising is constantly monitored and measured to determine its return-on-investment. Are marketers seeing a significant number of new customers or increased purchases to continue running a campaign?

However, social media is different and, as a result, much harder to quantify. How much is a “like” on Facebook worth, or a post on LinkedIn? Instead, social media marketing must use a different set of metrics, including reach, branding, actions, costs and reputation issues avoided, ClickZ explains.

“Establish goals for your social media marketing and related metrics that can effectively track your progress and allow you to tweak your social media campaign to improve its effectiveness,” the site noted.

Of the mentioned metrics, reputation issues avoided may be one of the most critical. As social media gives a voice to anyone at any time, the potential for an unhappy customer to make a small issue into a public one is quite large.

Small businesses looking to manage their reputation via social media should consider how large financial institutions are using the channel. Citibank, for example, has a specialized Twitter feed to answer customer questions and concerns.

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