This article is one of several in this series.

With emphasis placed on social media marketing in the search engine optimisation landscape, businesses should follow suit and look to have more of a social media presence. Social media should be an investment that is taken seriously rather than a hobby on an occasionally basis.

Using Namechk you can secure your social media usernames across over 100 social media platforms. By doing this and branding your social profiles then this will pay off and help to build your business brand, customer trust and encourage conversations and conversions.

Investing your time and effort to achieve this is something that puts many people off, but to generate results in any marketing efforts it’s a step that has to be taken to achieve and generate results. The question remains what needs to be executed to generate value from your social media marketing efforts?

Building your followers is a step that needs to be undertaken to build trust and an audience to engage with. First you need to define who the audience is? You’re start audience will be your already established customer base. What can do you do to generate initial interest?

Run a contest & offer prizes

Webinars can have both an online/offline audience, maximise this by adding twitter as a footer on each slide

Sign-up to directories such as tweiends, we follow and twellow.

Social media marketing is essentially interaction, but don’t be put off with you only start with a few hundred followers. It’s better to have a few hundred whom are interested in your product and services than the thousands of spam followers you can buy. Over time your presence will grow naturally through retweets and follow friends. With a few hundred followers who are engaging with your social media campaigns and reading and interacting with your messages will gather a response then the spam followers who will not interact, retweet or click through to links.

It’s a give and take relationship. To ensure a long term relationship and to keep your followers happy, follow them, interaction will encourage bigger following base of worthy followers, listen to what they are saying and respond.

In conclusion if you start taking steps forwards to securing your social media accounts and interacting with your client base and prospective client base, you’ll start enjoying social media marketing and putting in the effort to make it work. Studying what you’re doing on the social media platforms to see if there is a better way to market your accounts. This encourages more followers, engagement and conversions.

In my next article I’ll write how to manage your social media accounts using software to help engage and monitor click through rates.

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Brian on twitter @bmandcoweb