Part 2 of So What Comes Next - How to Market Using Social Media

You are at the point where you have a blog posting schedule. You are advertising your blog posts on FaceBook and Linkedin. You are also tweeting regularly about your blog posts, other interesting things and, of course, re-tweeting other peoples tweets. While you are accomplishing a lot doing these things, there is still a lot of Social Media Marketing to do.

All of your Social Media Marketing efforts are designed to drive traffic to your blog. Beyond FaceBook, Twitter and Linkedin, there are many more Social Media platforms and applications that you should be using to do the same thing.

First, you need to start with visuals. You should be using photos, drawings and videos in your blog to make it easier to read. Further the use of visuals, and especially videos, enhances the sales potential of your blog. Simply put, today, people are driven by video. They simply respond more favorably to a blog that has it.

Your photos should be included in your blog, and they should also be served through a photographic site such as flickr (which is free, by the way). Similarly, your videos should be included in your blog and served from a site like YouTube (or Vimeo if you prefer better video quality).

Once the photos and videos are set up, you should show them (or the link to them) on your Facebook and Linkedin accounts. You should also be tweeting about the visuals as often as possible. Don't go overboard here. Keep the material fresh. Two or at most three tweets of a single image, and then move on to tweeting the next image.

Photos and Videos don't necessarily have to have anything to do with your blog, even if you put them in your blog. The idea, again, is to get something out into the Social Media world that broadcasts your brand. I often tweet images directly from my iPhone to both my photographic and Social Media Twitter accounts, that are just nice, colorful pictures. Nothing to do with the blog or it's posts subjects. Tweeting the images keeps my name in front of people.

So now you are broadcasting your blog and the visuals that come with it. The next step in your Social Media plan are bookmarking sites. The top two bookmarking sites are Digg and Stumbleupon. With bookmarking sites you want to get someone else (say your best buddy or Social Media Marketing Consultant) to submit your blog to these two sites. You can submit your blog yourself, but the blogs credibility gets marked down and it gets seen much less often.

Once your blog is posted to a bookmarking site, other people will see it and give it a positive rating (negatives are possible too). The more positive ratings your blog gets, the more it gets served up and seen by other Digg and Stumbleupon viewers. The extra exposure is obviously a good thing.

You can also submit just your pictures (which is why we needed a flickr account) or Videos (likewise) to the bookmarking site. They too will be rated and can direct more traffic to your blog.

There are still more Social Media Marketing platforms and tools. I will write about more for you at another time.

Your questions and comments are always appreciated.