Social Media Marketing Tools and Tactics For Maximum Visibility

Social media is leveling the playing field for small businesses and entrepreneurs in many ways by giving everyone the opportunity to speak directly to customers and potential customers without the high costs of advertising and publicity.

Using a variety of social media marketing tools and tactics, strategically, even businesses on a budget can dramatically increase online visibility and search engine ranking.

Small businesses and entrepreneurs have heard the drums, heeded the call and jumped on the Facebook bandwagon, setting up a fan page for their businesses and even dipping their toes into the Twitter pool. But many are struggling to build a following andbeginning to wonder about the R.O.I. of their time in using this social media platform.

Although Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are free, the valuable resource of one’s time is required to actively engage, update and promote a brand message. Multi-purposing a brand’s creative content over a wide variety of social platforms is a good way to produce a virtuous marketing circle. This tactic can help users create a wider circle of influence by spreading their brand message to an exponentially larger audience; reaching consumers wherever they spend the majority of their time online.

Above is an example of a virtuous marketing circle. The small business owner creates the circle in the follow way.

1. A blog post on his or her blogsite or website.
2. Using an application called Networked Blogs, our business owner automatically pulls that blog post onto his Facebook Fan page which represents his business. Having set his application controls once, he never thinks about this again. His page is

automatically updated with his new blog post each and every time he posts.

3. The title and a link back to our business owner’s Facebook Page is automatically posted to her Twitter account, moments after it hits her Facebook page because she has set up an application called same blog post Our business owner has installed another application on Facebook called Facebook to Twitter.

4. Once or twice a month, our business owner chooses a particularly informative blog post and posts it to an ezine articles site, afree site that accepts and syndicates articles with valuable information. Articles on ezine sites can be picked up by other publications or blogs and can help our business owner reach a new audience. Additionally, Google and other search engines will index the article which helps bring our business owner and brand higher up the search engine rankings.

5. Our business owner has arranged a regular guest blogger opportunity with a blog that reaches a constituency that are interested in his or her business or product. By offering similar concepts to those in the original blog post, but reworked slightly to speak directly to this new audience, our business owner can reach yet another new group of potential customers.

With the virtuous marketing circle, one blog post reaches five unique readerships and our business owner has become the conversation.