Kickstart Marketing Tip 1 of 10 – Build Your Social Media Footprints

As a serial entrepreneur, I have a checklist of marketing items that I go through to start building my business brand online. Near the top of that list is to build out my social media profiles.Most people think that even if you have a local business, you do not need to market on the internet. That’s a big mistake. The internet has become the yellow pages at your fingertips. How many times have you Googled a service that you were looking for locally? That’s right. And guess what, your prospective clients or customers are doing the same thing.So the aim of this article is to help you establish social media profiles for the top social media websites. Here we go:1. Establish a Facebook Business (Fan) Page This is a powerful marketing tool for a few reasons.a) Facebook pages rank high in the search engine. It will most likely rank higher than your company website at first. You can include a link to your website which helps to improve the rank of your business website over time.b) Great way to stay in touch with customers and fans and develop a community around your business.c) Great way to reach prospects exponentially because each item posted on your wall that your fans respond to, gets exposed to their networks.d) Great way to promote and build your brand.You can establish a Facebook Page with or without a personal Facebook account. Just do a search for creating Facebook pages and follow through.2. Get on Twitter I know, I know. To some it seems like a silly waste of time. However, as an avid user myself, I can tell you that you can get new business from twitter, new JV partnerships, website traffic, referrals, content, feedback for new services that you are working on for your business and much more.Here are my best practice recommends for getting your business on Twitter.a) Establish a Twitter profile. Think carefully about the profile name. I prefer to use my name for the profile. Then link to my business website and include my business bio in the profile. But many have done it the other way around with much success. If your business or website name is unique, will be easily recognized by your target audience and resonate with what your business is about, then use the business name.b) Start following people in your business niche. You can find them using a Twitter directory of which there are many. I like WEfollow[dot]comc) Don’t just promote your website or business in tweets. Have conversations and network with ‘Tweeple’. Retweet the blog posts of people in your niche with a brief comment, tweet motivational quotes and interesting news items.3. Get on LinkedIn As with a Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn ranks high in search engines. So it is good to join LinkedIn, establish a personal profile and include your company website and blog links on it. You also get a chance to write a business summary or bio in the about me section.There are more, but I would see that these 3 are the top ones. You may want to establish profiles on maybe 2 more max. The idea is to establish social media profile and get active on those networks. If you get involved with too many social media networks, it will be hard to stay active and interact with people on all of them because it can be time consuming. The more networks you get involved the bigger the ‘water-down’ effect.