Social Media Marketing Experiment Underway

After a hectic couple of days with clients, I’ve finally been able to make a start on my social media marketing experiment. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

•  Faffed around slightly with my Facebook page. I’ve added a new custom cover photo and made more of an effort to update my statuses.
• Made more of an effort to connect with people via Linkedin. In actual fact, this has helped my Facebook page too. There’s a conversation in one of my groups that allows people to put a link to their Facebook page. The idea is that people scroll through the list, pick out the pages they like (depending on type of business and interests) and like the page. Most people send a little message saying that they’ve found the page through Linkedin and 9 times out of 10 they’ll get a like back. Personally, I think this is a brilliant idea. If you’d like to know more about this, contact me and I’ll be happy to chat with you.
• Created a new Twitter account, complete with a custom background.

Playing Around

It’s not really the design aspects of each account that I’m too concerned with at the moment, although I do find that side of things quite fun. The more important thing to me is how I represent myself in the way I run the accounts. For this reason, I’ve decided NOT to link my social media networks.

The reason I’ve come to this decision is quite simple: Each network is completely different. Twitter and Facebook are prime examples. Twitter only allows updates containing a maximum of 140 characters. Facebook allows reams and reams of words per status update (perfect for those personal rants that we all love to see on there). So it seems a little silly to either waste all the space on Facebook with a short Tweet, or have an incomplete status on Twitter, which is what happens when you link the two together.

Another valid point is that Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and any other social network site attracts different audiences. This is a fact. People might open every social network account possible, but they always prefer one over the others. I have friends that have both Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts. Some of them tweet every 2 seconds but only check Facebook once a week, whereas others will openly admit to abandoning their Twitter account because they didn’t really understand it. So why would I treat different audiences in the same way? Well the point is, I won’t be doing! 🙂

another thing I haven’t done is set up an automated message for followers on Twitter. I don’t think this method is effective anymore. In fact, I think it might be bordering on badgering people. I’d like people to follow me because they’re interested in what I have to say. If the first thing I have to say to them is a generic message asking them to do something that will help me and not them then I’m most likely to get them clicking the unfollow button!

Up Next…

So my short term aims for the rest of the week are:

• Try to increase my followers on Twitter and Facebook through writing incredibly witty and informative updates
• Set the new website up (I’m uber excited about this)
• Make more connections through Linkedin
• Try to log in and out of Pinterest within an hour (seriously, every time I go on that site, I spend far too long. I’ve banned myself from it until my workload is complete every day)

Hopefully the next time I have an experiment update, it will be posted on the new website (did I mention I’m excited about that?). I’ll look forward to seeing some of you on my various pages.

A Copywriter’s Social Media Marketing Experiment – Is the hype true?

According to an article in Forbes by Stephanie Chandler, “Social media isn’t a fad and it’s not going away”. Well I believe her. But how effective is social media marketing? More to the point, how easy is it to implement successful social media marketing campaign? I aim to find out the answers to both of these questions by conducting a little experiment.

I’ve decided to launch a full social media marketing campaign to promote my services as a freelance copywriter. Now I already have a blog, Linkedin profile, Facebook page and Twitter account. However, my presence on these networks is rather unfocused to say the least. Also, I haven’t been keeping them up to date which is rule number one on the social networking scene. Bad Memma.

So, I have decided to start all over again with a renewed vigor for social media marketing. Over the course of the next few months, I will:

• Set up a brand new Twitter account solely for my copywriting services
• Tweak my existing Facebook and Linkedin accounts
• Explore and utilize the benefits of social media management tools such as Hootsuite

I will also look in to setting up a brand new website complete with blogs, newsletters and informational articles. I’ll also be revealing my findings from this experiment on the site.

What Am I Hoping For?

The whole point of this experiment will be to see how much exposure I can get by implementing good social networking practices. I want to know how easy it is for somebody (like me) who doesn’t have much experience with social media marketing to make a success out of it.

At the end of the experiment, I hope to have gained valuable business leads and successfully promoted myself as a respected freelance writer for the health and beauty and self help niches. I hope that by marketing myself successfully, I will be able to offer existing and future clients a competent service using the same tools. If all goes well, it will be a win win situation.

So then, without further ado, I will start my very own social media campaign from scratch.

I’ll update this post with the link to my new website when it’s up and running. I hope to see you all there!