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Get On Board with Latest Social Marketing Trends

Written on March 25th, 2008 by Joseph in Franchising Developments.

A recent survey has shown that more than 60% of top global companies opt for some types of social media marketing methods these days. Social media marketing, in a broader sense, means using social media websites like MySpace, Facebook and Youtube to promote business, but in a indirect, informal way. It’s also about information-sharing through various other means such as text, images, blogs (both audio and video), RSS, wikis and podcasts. The importance of such marketing is that it comes at a very competitive price and has greater effects on the desired candidates than traditional marketing tools. Hence, social media marketing is the best word-of-mouth promotion you can have for your business.

So, whether you are a franchisee starting a franchise or a franchisor offering franchise businesses for sale, it’s very important that you know the fine points of this special kind of marketing. Here are some tips to help you in this matter:

1. Add different kinds of social media tools in your article pages. It can be bookmarking links; by adding the codes of leading bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit in your article page, you will allow visitors to your website to bookmark their favorite portions of the website. That, in turn, will make sure that people who are genuinely interested in you will come back for a second time.

2. Another tool to notify your patrons of any kind of change that you make in your website is to add a RSS feed to it. Then people can readily know whenever you make changes in your article.

3. Become a part of MySpace – one of the most popular social networking websites. Create a page in your name and connect with people of similar background and interests. In your profile, there will be a section on yourself. Here, you can say a few words regarding yourself and don’t forget to add a link to your website to drive traffic there. One major thing that you should remember while marketing in MySpace or any other social networking site is that never use a strong advertisement pitch. If you try in-your-face advertising methods, then you may soon become unpopular and blocked by other users. So, use this website as a gateway to your main website.

4. Create interesting videos relevant to your business. Again, don’t make it an advertisement; just add links to your website before and after your video presentation. Franchise Ultra Lounge, the premier social networking site in the franchise industry, also hosts videos. Franchisors who would like to explore hosting video and audio casts can contact brandEXPANSION’s franchise expansion team.

5. Similarly, podcasts can be created to tell about the services of your company. They can be more marketing-oriented than others. Another thing that you can share is photos of your product and allied services in websites like Photobucket. Again, don’t forget to add links to your home site.

6. Create a blog of interesting articles that are related to your business. Update it regularly and allow people to e-mail the article to others by adding that sharing tool in the page. Franchisors can post their news on brandEXPANSIONHotPress as well.
7. Lastly, remember that social media marketing means shouting in a market. You may also get hecklers and detractors. So, you can add negative comments in your blogs and websites in order to make them more inclusive. But don’t forget to delete the too aggressive or offensive ones!

To know more on this topic, contact brandEXPANSION.