Social Media Marketing

Social media is a really big deal. The population of the United States is estimated to be 304,059,724 (Census Bureau, Population Division, 2009). Facebook, for example, has more than 300,000,000 active users (Facebook, 2009). Fifty percent of those active users log on in a day. LinkedIn has over 50,000,000 members, spanning over 200 countries. Every Fortune 500 company has executives that are members of LinkedIn (LinkedIn Corporation). You can use these online hangouts for branding and lead generation. They are the ideal way to quickly promote your business for free, my favorite price. What are you waiting for?

By 2010 Generation Y will outnumber both Generation X and Baby Boomers. Ninety-six percent have joined a social network making social media the simple choice to target that demographic (The Millennials, 2007).

The average age of a MySpace user is 26. MySpace is an excellent place to craft a completely developed company profile and an immense outreach system for B2B.

Twitter’s average user is 31. Think of Twitter as a broadcast medium so you will need about 1000 followers to reap the full benefit. Tweets are text posts that contain 140 characters or less sent to your Twitter followers. Use Twitter to push tweets out to other platforms like Facebook. Personalize Twitter background for branding. A good tool for monitoring what people are saying about your brand on Twitter and track stats is at www.HootSuite.com.

The average age of a Facebook user is 33, however the fastest growing group of users are females age 55 to 65. I’m telling you this just to let you know Facebook is a good medium to reach a wide variety of demographics. Facebook will create a button for you to install on your company site that lets visitors click on it and see your content on Facebook. You can also create a Fan Box Widget that will allow users to view your Facebook page stream. You can link your Facebook page to Twitter. You’ll need at least 100 friends on Facebook to use this medium effectively for your business.

The average age of a LinkedIn user is 39. LinkedIn is great for sending updates to business associates. LinkedIn is a more traditional platform for business networking. Try to put your keywords in your profile and repeat it in your content. To best utilize LinkedIn for your business, you’ll need to accumulate 500 or more connections.

If you need help contact me or check out my web site at http://www.denisedriggers.com/.