Social media marketing has been becoming very popular within the past few years because of the increase in social networks and sharing/bookmarking websites it has even grown bigger than the almighty email. If your still thinking it’s a waste of time and that most of it doesn’t work your wrong. Social media marketing can make a business stand out from the crowd and also earn you some extra money on top of it. Here are some guidelines to marketing you or your business effectively.

1. Get connected

You probably are already a regular user on Facebook why not help your business and yourself benefit from it? Facebook currently has at least a 3 million user base which means their are a lot of people you can share your business experiences with. Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn and other uprising network sites or community forums are definitely websites you want to have a business account on. Some sites also feature analytics which are very useful for viewing how may people are actually clicking your links and the difference between last months clicks and this months clicks.

2. Tweet your posts, retweet others and start conversations

One thing people love is someone who retweets them nobody can dislike that! Don’t be afraid to tell someone hello you never know if they could collaborate with you in your next or upcoming project. It’s also a good idea to set a time late in the afternoon at the end of the day that you can work on social networking and posting on blogs because later in evening you usually don’t have as much energy as you did in the beginning of the day and it’s much easier talking to people and posting on blogs then trying to throw together mockups or code. Also using this routine you can work more on code and things that need more focus and energy in the morning and work hours without the distraction of worrying about posting that new post on all of your networks that you added to your blog last night.

3. Set goals

This one is very important if you don’t set goals you won’t achieve results. Set realistic goals and time frames for when you want to complete them. Having a goal of getting 3,000 followers in a week is not very realistic.

4. Don’t give up

Social media marketing can be a difficult field people are always looking for new keywords to hit in blog posts and other ways to generate traffic. Don’t worry if you only have 50 followers on twitter stick to your goals and you will see positive effects.

5. Use tools to make things move faster

I personally use BufferApp to schedule my tweets daily so I can focus on other things such as writing quality content on my blog and working. Their are also many tools now available to help you manage multiple networks in one area that you can find easily with the use of Google.