It’s no secret that social media (SM) is in the process of revolutionizing the small to medium size business landscape. For all intensive purposes, it is a level playing field when it comes to marketing a business. This being the case, the right SM marketing strategy can allow even small businesses to better compete against much larger competitors.

However, social media marketing still poses significant challenges for smaller businesses. For one, smaller businesses often have fewer staff and smaller marketing budgets. This being the case, it’s not uncommon for small business owners to spend disproportionate amounts of time on social media when compared to their bigger budget competitors.

Time Invested on Social Media Vs Time Wasted

If you are a small business owner, you’ve likely spent time at some point simply staring at a computer screen steadily realizing that you have no idea what kind of content to post. Worse, content creation itself can take an inordinate amount of time and this is time which many small businesses simply can’t afford to waste.

Of course, things get easier if businesses stagger distribution of self-created content in between syndication of third party news, entertainment, and social media posts. However, this still takes time. In like manner, after posting, it’s not uncommon for businesses to have to spend even more time responding to social media channeled customer inquiries and suggestions.

How Automated Posting Can Help

Because managing social media posts and profiles can be so time intensive, many small to medium sized businesses choose to automate the posting of new social media content. To do this, many use dedicated social media management applications, some of which are also able to facilitate the posting of content under different company employee profiles.

Could Social Media Management Software Benefit Your Business?

When all is said and done, social media management software isn’t just about saving time. Rather, social media management applications represent a way for smaller businesses to see a greater return on investment in regard to their SM marketing efforts.

Of course, social media management applications can’t actually create content. However, by automating posts across different SM platforms, businesses can stand to claw back time which they can otherwise spend on better content creation in the first place.

Network Marketers have understood early on the viral power of Social Media and the potential it carries in driving traffic to their online sales letters.

The one thing though, that an overwhelming 99% of online marketers didn’t understand is that Social Media is not a free advertising billboard where they could constantly pitch their business opportunity and products.

This approach is very unproductive and could even damage reputations.

Social Media is about building relationships, allowing other people to know you and your products, building your brand and making available quality content that you publish on the internet. Of course, having a valuable contribution for the community will eventually get you the traffic and exposure your business needs in order to grow. Leads and sells can’t be generated unless online marketers acknowledge that first they must provide value to their market.

Social media can be defined as a syndication and communication channel. Couple of remarks are needed here.

First, Syndication is the process of you creating some kind of content – text, video, audio – and then distributing it across different points on the internet. A restrained example is posting an article on your blog and automatically having it shown as an excerpt on Twitter’s timeline and your Facebook account.

This process can become extremely complex once you employ a whole range of social media platforms, also know as syndication points, in your traffic generation strategy.

The end result will be that you benefit from this multiplied effect of value every time your content is automatically redirected through different channels in different syndication points. Compare it to multiplying instead of adding.

Whether is SEO or Social Media, your focus should be on creating good quality content. Good content attracts people linking to it and all the benefits that come from that – traffic to your pages, increasing your SEO rankings which, again, translates into more exposure and traffic.

Second, Being a Communication Channel doesn’t mean you have the opportunity to communicate your business and products to you audience. They are your friends or contacts (terminology varies) because they are interested in your person and not your products.

This may not be true with the majority of network marketeres, but then again, this article is about what should be done. To resume, it’s like inviting someone in your home and start to explain all the benefits of such and such product or bizzopp.

Instead, communicate free information and breaking news about something of general interest for your niche market.

In Social Media, sales are made by offering ten times more content for free.

Just because you’ve made available three or four free quality releases it doesn’t mean you’ll make a sale.

It’s just as hard responding to one’s needs as is responding to thousands. The only real currency in Social Media Marketing is your time.

Social media optimization services are one of the most significant services today. The growing market of internet compels a person to take advantage of social media optimization services . Search engines rankings are a great contributor for the success of your business. It can create easy access for your customers thus you would be able to make a good impression on your prospective customers and retain higher conversion rates. The increasing number of users that social media attracts cannot be ignored by business owners which is why they employ social media optimization services to help promote their business on these social networking channels.

Rules of successful social media optimization services

When you employ the services of SEO Company in New York you tend to hope for an increase in the traffic of your website and increase in the visibility of your firm online. There are many customers who surf the internet to browse through products and services for the firm. In order to integrate social media with internet marketing strategies you need to employ a reputed SEO Company in New York. Here are some rules that need to be taken care of while procuring services for optimization:

Content

The most important thing that needs to be taken into consideration is the content that is distributed through social media. Relevancy of content that is related to your industry as well provides information about the development of your business should be promoted through the medium of social networking. The content should be appealing to the target audience so that they respond favourably to the company’s posts.

Bookmarking and tagging

SEO Company in New York looks after their client’s webpage by tagging them on various social channels. Tagging and bookmarking are an important part of spreading awareness about the products and services of a firm. This helps in exposure and gaining attention of prospective customers for client’s business.

RSS feeding

Really simple syndication is abbreviated as RSS feeds. The simple formula helps to manage communication thread between the customer and the client. When a visitor subscribes to your website or your blog the word about the kind of communication between you and your prospective customer would spread with the channel of social media.

Discussion Forum

One can benefit immensely through the medium of discuss forums for social media optimization services. You can be aware about what people who are interested in your brand and company are communicating with each other when they correspond through the channel social media. Business houses can gain professional suggestions and important feedback through this channel of communication easily.

Optimizing content for your business can be a profitable venture as you would get to connect with eminent clients online and take advantage of their opinion about your products and services. The medium of internet is widespread thus you need to be careful about the kind of services that you would employ in order to spread awareness about your brand and services. The response and feedback of clients is important for analyzing the performance of your brand in the market.

Who does not want to give a head start to his or her respective business? Often it has been seen that much is said and done to promote a business, but eventually they do not positively affect into the growth of an organization. Although a business house spends thousands of money on this, it cannot evade the shortcomings. And so, organizations are very much concerned of implying such a strategy that would help them to broaden up the pathway of success in a sure shot manner.

Along with the new age developments in the spheres of computers and internet, most of the business houses are aiming to hoist a successful online presence. It has been a practice of the day for this business houses to possess a website of their own. It is through herein that they eye to reach to a greater spectrum of clients, and that too within a very fast pace of time. But hosting a website just only renders your company with an online presence; it never ensures you to gather a strong foothold in the world wide client base.

Now the question is, then what is the way out? The way out is social media marketing to grab the services of any of the vastly available social media platforms. Nowadays, this has been the buzz word in making the publicity of any website in a much effective manner. As more and more people are getting internet savvy, social networking sites are also gaining much popularity. In the present day world, each and every one of us, who are acquainted with the paraphernalia of the web world, seem to have an account with one or more of these social media sites through which we communicate with the outer world.

Eying to this ever growing popularity of these networking sites, has came up to be one of the most efficient avenue to market the products and services that an organization offers. It has a higher potentiality to reach to the target audience at a faster rate as compared to the traditional ones. A well drafted set of social media plans, therefore, is a necessity while opting for this trendy avenue. And it is herein where the help of able social media experts comes. Without the services of an expert, it is pretty hard to give the necessary thrust to your business that you are looking to generate.

So, if you appoint the services of some well experienced social media experts, you are definite to achieve success in projecting your business on the World Wide Web in a perfect manner. An online marketing expert is the right person who will guide you properly to follow the road map that will eventually be focused on your core competence as also that will be gelling to your vision to the very best. The backbone of successful social media marketing can rightly be, therefore, traced to the accurate selection of the strategist. So, let no stone unturned to select your guide, and reap the benefits of this neo-age concept.

Creating an “Associated Press” syndication engine model is a tall task for anyone to take on, but that’s exactly what 3-year old Mint Social is doing from its Scottsdale, Arizona base.

Mint Social is a social media marketing company, working with regional and national clients to deliver all types of web content, media, articles, videos, press releases, photos and more to spread a company’s organic search rankings. Mint Social president Matthew O’ Brien likens its business model to a ‘syndication engine for businesses.’

“Our clients come to us looking for help with social media marketing and helping them to develop content that can be used online in a variety of ways,” said the soft-spoken O’Brien, a 20+-yr. veteran of digital technology and Internet work. “Mint Social can help to educate, inform and engage a prospect, and market to them where they are online, hence the syndication model. And then we provide links and hooks back to our clients’ most relevant landing pages, in order to monetize and convert that traffic into some sort of response.”

Steve Heideman, Mint Social’s Chief Technology Officer, calls this process ‘building gravity around your brand.’

“Our USP is this: we market content in a number of ways online, by repurposing blog posts, articles, video transcripts and more,” says Heideman. “And we do it via social, local and mobile as well. In doing this, with concentrated effort over a period of time, a brand can achieve spectacularly higher awareness levels online.”

Mint Social has also created its own model of social media marketing and brand awareness for companies doing business locally. It’s called ‘Geo-SoMo’ and it refers to geographically-targeted content for local, social and mobile.

“It’s a huge opportunity for local businesses to be found online” exclaims Heideman. “Only 7% of local businesses have claimed their business place on Google Places – that means 93% of those businesses have not, and that leaves a gaping hole in the business’s ability to be found by mobile users online.”

Mint’s overall process with clients, as described by O’Brien, is one of online efficiency and relevant brand clarity.

“We create a ‘conversation relevancy match’, where we look at what’s being searched in search engines and what’s being discussed in social networks and Web 2.0, interactive dialogue-type websites. And then we look at how they’re positioning their company, the terms and how they describe themselves, to see if there’s a match, if they’ll actually speaking to their prospective audience in the best light. Unfortunately, we usually find a disconnect there.

“So, we try to really make sure that we’re matching the way our clients are presenting their businesses, with what people are looking for, searching for, and talking about online. And that becomes the basis of building out a company’s social media footprint, their online visibility, their brand.”

Mint Social works with prominent business and consumer-focused brands in automotive, manufacturing, technology, legal, healthcare and other industries. It’s that variety that keeps things interesting and growing for Mint Social, which has seen a healthy yearly growth since it began.

It continues to bring to its clients an intriguing blend of content marketing, social media, good old fashioned editorial development and public relations, all mixed in with creative online strategies to bring about increased brand awareness. That’s where the future of marketing is headed, O’Brien thinks.

“Delivering content online in a variety of ways to get your brand found and to drive business goals – isn’t that what’s it all about today?”