10 Laws of Social Media Marketing

It's vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and -- perhaps most importantly -- your bottom line.

1. The Law of Listening

Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus

It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality

Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience

Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding

If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence

Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Law of Value

If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

8. The Law of Acknowledgment

You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9. The Law of Accessibility

Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Law of Reciprocity

You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.  

What Is Social Media Marketing?

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites.

Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of other activities.

How Are Search & Social Media Marketing Related?

Why would a search marketer — or a site about search engines — care about social media? The two are very closely related.

Social media often feeds into the discovery of new content such as news stories, and “discovery” is a search activity. Social media can also help build links that in turn support into SEO efforts. Many people also perform searches at social media sites to find social media content. Social connections may also impact the relevancy of some search results, either within a social media network or at a ‘mainstream’ search engine.

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

Pinterest

Linkedin

YouTube

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of Internet marketing that utilizes social networking websites as a marketing tool. The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach.

One of the key components of SMM is social media optimization (SMO). Like search engine optimization (SEO), SMO is a strategy for drawing new and unique visitors to a website. SMO can be done two ways: adding social media links to content, such as RSS feeds and sharing buttons -- or promoting activity through social media by updating statuses or tweets, or blog posts.

SMM helps a company get direct feedback from customers (and potential customers) while making the company seem more personable. The interactive parts of social media give customers the opportunity to ask questions or voice complaints and feel they are being heard. This aspect of SMM is called social customer relationship management  (social CRM).

SMM became more common with the increased popularity of websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In response, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has updated its rules to include SMM. If a company or its advertising agency provides a blogger or other online commenter with free products or other incentives to generate positive buzz for a product, the online comments will be treated legally as endorsements. Both the blogger and the company will be held responsible for ensuring that the incentives are clearly and conspicuously disclosed, and that the blogger's posts contain no misleading or unsubstantiated statements and otherwise complies with the FTC's rules concerning unfair or deceptive advertising.

How to build your email list

How to build your email list—fast

Whenever I write about email marketing, several people ask about how to build your email list quickly. Kind of makes sense; writing masterful emails doesn’t make much of a difference if no one’s reading them.

You can choose from four list-building tactics:

Advertising. The issue with advertising is that it can get very expensive—even before you see any results. But when it works, it can create incredibly good, consistent results.

Affiliates. If you have lots of connections to people in your field who have large emails lists and willingness to promote something of yours, you can get almost any results you want.

Speaking. As long as you get in front of large, new audiences on a regular basis, you can grow your email list by asking audience members to sign up. However, making this tactic work takes a lot more work and is harder than most people think.

Guest blogging. It’s the only low-cost, effective way to grow your list if you don’t have a massive advertising budget and you’re not well connected. That said, most people don’t get almost any subscribers with guest blogging because they don’t know how to write effective guest posts.

In case you’re wondering, I have yet to hear of any other reliable way to quickly grow your email list without relying on luck, but if you know of some, do let me know.

All of these list-building tactics work regardless of which email marketing strategy you use the most. So, you can choose based on your resources.

Email marketing strategy

1. Email marketing strategy: Offers

Many e-commerce businesses rely heavily on making offers in their emails, but regardless of what kind of a business you run, you should know how to make offers in your emails.

The basic idea is to urge people to get something they really want. That can mean giving them a discount coupon for a product they’ve indicated they’re interested in. Or it can mean a general promotion that goes out to everyone on your list.

When you promote something, you always run the risk of seeming “sales-y.” However, if you seem sales-y, you’ve done something wrong.

A good offer doesn’t feel sales-y. It doesn’t feel pushy. It doesn’t feel manipulative.

Instead, a good offer feels helpful. So, when you promote something via email, do it as a friend who wants to help the recipient.

That isn’t to say that sales-y promotions wouldn’t ever create results—as Internet marketing “gurus” have proved. The results just aren’t as good as they could be.

People buy when they feel that they have good reasons to do so. So, you need a strong value proposition (=great reasons for buying what you sell) in order to be able to give people good reasons for buying.

But if people don’t believe those reasons, they don’t buy either. As long as you seem like a friend who’s trying to help them, people are likely to believe that you’re sincere and that buying from you is a good decision.

The downside of just making offers is that they’re not useful on their own. People on your list won’t receive any value from you unless they buy what you’re promoting, so they have little reason to stay subscribed. That’s why many e-commerce sites struggle to keep people interested.

However, if you never make any offers, you’ll struggle to make any sales, so don’t forget or shy away from this email marketing strategy. Rather, learn to combine it with the next strategy, so even your promotions have value to your subscribers.

2. Email marketing strategy: Content

SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses and bloggers often use content email marketing strategy more than other strategies.

They create a piece of content (e.g., report, infographic, video, article) and tell people about it with an email. Or the emails might be content-rich on their own.

Some of the content is available publicly (e.g., blog articles), but some content should be behind an “information wall.”

The information wall works just like a “pay wall” except it doesn’t require a monetary payment, but instead it asks for information from the visitor. The simplest information wall is an email opt-in form that requires people to join the business owner’s list in order to get the content.

But if you want to make the most of this email marketing strategy, an opt-in form shouldn’t be the only information wall you use because once people have joined your list, asking them to do it again doesn’t make much sense.

For example, you can ask people to share a link to the content in social media before getting access to it. Or you can ask for more information about them (e.g., specific interests or their company’s size).

The additional information gives you a better chance to tailor your email marketing to match what they’re most interested in. And that gives you a better chance to convert them into customers.

Content email marketing is a great tool that you should learn to use regardless of what kind of a business you run. When you use it well, people will start to see you as a trusted source, which makes them more likely to buy what you sell.

But you shouldn’t stick to just content. You should also make offers—and build relationships with the people in your list.

3. Email marketing strategy: Relationship building

For many businesses, building a relationship with their leads is the primary reason for sending any emails. That said, very few marketers rely solely on this email marketing strategy. But some trust it more than is healthy for their businesses.

You could think that you build relationships automatically if you make offers and provide useful content (the previous email marketing strategies).

To some extent that’s true. But it’s not all there is to this strategy.

For example, you can ask your subscribers to reply to your emails or ask them to fill a survey. And you can tell what’s going on in your life or about your personal beliefs and opinions to create a stronger emotional connection.

Note that whenever you share an opinion or belief, you need to be willing to distance everyone who has an opposing view.

Most people don’t mind if you don’t share their worldviews, but some do. So, talking about things that don’t directly relate to your business (and topics around it) is always a risk.

Unless you want to play with fire, avoid dipping into politics, religion, sexuality, and other topics where many people have fundamentalist views.

If, however, you know that most of your audience shares your opinion on a topic that’s important to them, you can instantly seem more trustworthy by pointing it out because people trust people who are similar to them.

But most importantly, you should always remember relationship building as an email marketing strategy. No matter what kind of an email you send.

If you forget that you should build a relationship with your subscribers, your offers will feel pushy and your content distant.

Remember that you’re not a company. You’re a person. Act and write like one.

What makes email marketing so effective and its advantages?

Email marketing has some significant advantages compared to most other marketing methods:

High reach: When you get people to join your email list (aka “subscribe to updates” or “opt in”), you can actually reach them. If they just like your Facebook page, for example, it’s quite unlikely that they’d actually see your updates. Sure, not everyone opens your emails, but the numbers are usually still in favor of email compared to other communication methods. 

Great flexibility: Email marketing can work for pretty much any kind of business. It doesn’t matter whether you sell houses, lingerie, or consulting; you can get lots of sales as long as you use the right email marketing strategy in the right place. And you can promote practically anything relating to your business—you aren’t limited to sending links to your sales pages.

Minimal risk: Some top marketers expect to burn through $10,000 of advertising budget before even knowing if they can make a campaign profitable. With email marketing, the costs are much, much lower. A simple system like AWeber is very affordable even if your business isn’t a huge success yet. And even if you go with something advanced like Infusionsoft, you’re still far away from the kinds of investments many other marketing tactics require. Sure, email marketing and advertising aren’t directly comparable (advertising is mainly used to reach new prospects), but you get the point.

Low barrier of entry: Besides being comparatively cheap, email marketing doesn’t take such a steep learning curve as many other tactics. Even if you’re not an expert, you can see great results when you learn to use the different email marketing strategies—great execution of the strategies improves your results a lot, but even if you make some mistakes, you aren’t wasting your time.

Full control: Most other marketing tactics are at the mercy of policy changes (e.g., Google and AdWords) and other decisions beyond your control. Sure, some laws affect how you can use email marketing, but laws rarely change with short notice and they even more infrequently radically change what you can do.