This edition of Happy Minutes includes Mari Smith, name the Pied Piper of Facebook by Fast Company. Mari explains how to research your demographics on Facebook. It’s important to know what your target audience looks like as well as where they are on and off line. Mari gives you a great tip on how to see the number of people that are within your exact target audience on Facebook.com.

I don’t understand how it will help my business!

I am constantly hearing the above statement from almost anyone I meet at a networking event after they learn that 3 Elements is a social media company. After talking to me for 5 minutes, they get it; at least a little bit and wants to know more. So I decided to write a blog post about that statement to help others better understand how social media can help grow their business, and understand how you don’t have to spend tons of time online to make it successful.

Mari Smith explained Facebook and Twitter beautifully when she said, “They are a Relationship Management and Visibility Tool.” If you take a second to think about that, you will realize that statement didn’t include the word ‘sales’. However, when you are building and maintaining relationships and gaining exposure, what ends up happening….SALES!

Often, I think business owners create an account on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linked In, etc., fill out their profile, connect to a few people, and then sit back and get frustrated when their traffic and sales haven’t gone up. This is because it is a tool, which has to 1. Be a part of your marketing plan, and 2. Needs to constantly be used to be effective.

Once I say, “you need to constantly be updating and using your social media accounts”, the busy business owner looks stressed and immediately says, “well there’s no way I have time for that.” But my argument is; do you have time to build relationships, gain exposure, make sales and have awesome customer service?” Of course the answer is, YES!

If the answer is no, I would suggest you stop what you are doing and close up shop because you’ll never be successful. However, if you said yes, keep reading because I’m going to give you a few tips on how to be effective on social media, but not spend tons of hours a week.

1.Learn it. (Or hire someone who knows it.) You must understand what social media is used for, how to use, and the tools to help you use it in order to be successful. If you had a manual car, but didn’t know how to drive stick, you would either stall a million times, fluid the engine (speaking from experience) or never move more than 3 feet. Why would you buy and try to drive a manual car if you didn’t know stick, and didn’t plan on learning it?

Social media, just like almost anything else, is the same way. You need to learn it to be able to make action happen online. If you don’t have the desire or time to learn it, then you need to hire someone that will learn it for you and work in house, or you need to hire a consultant or company that specializes in social media.  And this applies to pretty much any business and leads me to my next point.

2.Social media NEEDS to be a part of your Marketing Plan. If it isn’t, you are missing a huge and targeted audience that needs and wants to learn more about your company….online. Like Bob Dylan sang; Times, they are a changin’. With technology being so advanced, fast and shiny, we are more likely to sit down and pull up digg.com or NYTimes.com to find out current news versus go pick up the paper from our driveway.

We are also shopping this way. And I don’t know about you, but I go to Facebook and Twitter to ask what I should do this weekend, which movie I should watch and were I should have lunch. If someone was suggesting your restaurant to me, or your movie theater, or your event to attend, without you doing it yourself; wouldn’t that be fabulous!? A recommendation goes so much further because it is an endorsement rather than a suggestion.

Having an online presences helps put your company at top of mind when people are searching for their answers. It also puts you before your competition. Having social media in your marketing plan adds a whole other world for you to market that could double, triple or quadruple your sales, readers, subscribers, etc. Is it worth it to you yet???

3. Measure your Online Efforts. Just like all of your marketing campaigns, you need to be tracking what you are doing to see if it is effective or not. If you are spending time marketing, networking and promoting online, you need to see if it is paying off, and which site is most effective. One thing to note…social media is 70% networking, posting articles from your industry, etc., 20% promoting other people, and 10% self promotion. Only 10%! If done correctly, it won’t take too much time until you are a leader online. But if not done correctly, when you start tracking your efforts, you are not going to see the results you want.

Each month track your traffic, top referring sites, percentage of growth, forwarded URL’s, etc., via Google Analytics. If you don’t have analytics, get them immediately at google.com/analytics. It’s free to add to your site, and vital to measuring your ROI. Also, using a URL shortener like bit.ly or su.pr will store the URL’s you shorten and display how many people clicked on the URL, where they are located, and where they clicked from (twitter, email, etc.)

At the end of every month I generate a report with all of the above info and plan my next month’s sales goals, tweak my social media strategies and learn from what info was valuable and spread virally, and what didn’t.

If you have questions, or still don’t understand how social media would help your business grow, please contact us and we will help you see the light!