Social Media Marketing Tools and Tactics | The Virtuous Circle

Using a variety of social media marketing tools and tactics strategically, even businesses on a budget can dramatically increase online visibility and search engine ranking.
Small businesses and entrepreneurs have heard the drums, heeded the call and jumped on the Facebook bandwagon, setting up a fan page for their businesses and even dipping their toes into the Twitter pool. But many are struggling to build a following and beginning to wonder about the R.O.I. of their time in using this social media platform.

The virtuous marketing circle engages multiple learning styles to reach more potential clients and customers.

Although Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are free, the valuable resource of one’s time is required to actively engage, update and promote a brand message.  And, time is expensive. Making the content business create work harder and across multiple platforms is a good way to produce a virtuous marketing circle and increase the ROI of content creation. This tactic can help users create a wider circle of influence by spreading their brand message to an exponentially larger audience; reaching consumers wherever they spend the majority of their time online.

Below is an example of a virtuous marketing circle. The small business owner creates the circle in the follow way.

1. A blog post on his or her blogsite or website.

2. Using a Facebook application such as Notes or Networked Blogs, our business owner automatically pulls that blog post onto his Facebook Fan page, which represents his business. Having set his application controls once, he never thinks about this again. His page is automatically updated with his new blog post each and every time he posts.

3. The title and a link back to our business owner’s Facebook Page is automatically posted to her Twitter account, moments after it hits her Facebook page because she has set up an application called the Facebook Twitter App.  So now that single blog post has now been seen on three different platforms and potentially by three different audiences with some minor overlap.

4. Once or twice a month, our business owner chooses a particularly informative blog post and posts it to an e-zine articles site that accepts and syndicates articles with valuable information. Articles on e-zine sites can be picked up by other publications or blogs and helps our business owner reach a new audience with content he or she has already created. Additionally, Google and other search engines will index the articles which helps bring our business owner and brand higher up the search engine rankings.

5. Occasionally our business owner chooses one of his or her blog posts and records it as a podcast, saves it as an MP3, posts it to a Podcast site, itunes and perhaps to a special Podcast tab on the original website.  Producing the same messages in multiple formats helps engage different learning styles in potential customers.

6.  Just as our business owner was able to rework the original blog into a podcast, so she does so again, in a short how-to video about a particularly post.  This video is posted to YouTube, then brought into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and again, back to the original blog.

With the virtuous marketing circle, one blog post reaches six or seven unique readerships and our business owner has created mutiple touchpoints from which to engage with clients, exponentially increasing the chances of being seen and heard.  The original content he or she created has now been broadcast throughout the virtuous marketing circle.

How do you reuse, rework, re-introduce your ideas and messages to reach a wider crowd.  Let’s share ideas.