In today’s world, digital marketing has become a force to reckon with; more and more people are totally hooked on to their iPads, tablets, or Smartphones, and are constantly checking in and chatting with their e-friends. You may not be able to find a lot of people who aren’t part of Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or some such social network. In fact many of us are more comfortable in the virtual world than the real.
Social networking sites are all about promoting yourself unabashedly. Someone rightly said that if the Facebook profile photo of a person doesn’t attract you, nothing will, because that is definitely the best photo of that person ever. Sadly not all of us use these sites to our best advantage. Most of us are more interested in announcing who we’re in a relationship with or showing everyone how cute our pets are. Well that’s all ok if you’re just interacting with your friends. But if you’re serious about furthering yourself professionally, you need to have a separate account. You need to take care of these things:
• Have a separate account for your professional blog
• Ensure the image is professional and the design, comprehensive.
• The design should stress on your brand. Customize settings if needed to achieve this.
• Uploaded photos and writing should be directly related to your blog theme
• Increase your appeal by writing and commenting on the hottest current topics of discussion and public interest
• Aggressively target your audience and get them to advertise for you; nothing succeeds like word of mouth publicity.
• Highlight stories that can be connected with your blog
• Spy on your competitors’ pages, and ascertain how often they post statuses or tweet and what stuff they actually upload. This will give you some pointers on what you need to do
• Content is king. Quality and not quantity. These are not just mere buzzwords but real effective strategies; simple yet very effective. Nobody wants to read lines of ‘duh’ content.
• On your blog page, you could include buttons for social networking sites so that your readers can directly share the writing on their profiles.
If you do it right you can cleverly harness the social media to target the right audience like other writers, journalists or even charities and other organizations that are in some way related to your blog theme.
Thanks to social networking sites like twitter, Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn, you don’t have to spend a big money to reach wider audience. In fact I would say that creating a page on such a site is easier, much less work and headache, quicker and cheaper than hosting your own website.
When you share your articles, blogs and posts on these sites, others can also do the same, when they like it. The domino effect will greatly benefit you. When your subscribers or friends share it on their profiles, people who you don’t even know, may read your article and share them over.