Social Media and Marketing

All week, I've been trying to schedule in my social marketing - via Twitter and Facebook mainly, with a little LinkedIn in there. And I've realized one thing. When I have to think about it, it's no fun.

I'm not a social media marketer and there's no reason for me to be one. There are so many people who enjoy analyzing the social sites and how to effectively use them. I think I'll leave it up to them.

Still, I'm going to produce my own personal little report of what the social sites do for me and how I found them useful. I may take another week though on it. There's a few items coming out next week in my product list that I want to announce, and I would like to increase the Christian membership on the Twitter account by another 1,000. I'll explain why in my personal report later.

I was prompted to make this report by Bob Bly - a suggestion by him only in a blog discussion. I think I've learned that I'm more anti-social site marketing than I thought in practice and enjoyment.

Would I allow an assistant to use some payroll time keeping my social site accounts updated during the week? Absolutely. In fact, that's on my list for the future. My assistant would spend about 15 minutes per day listing the announcements I want put up. Then, I would use my break time to the tune of about 1/2 hour a day to personally respond to a few others and add some personal touches to my accounts.

I'm all for using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social sites for marketing outreach. Just not as enthusiastic about it as I thought I was. I think I prefer them for personal reasons...probably the main reasons many of them were designed for in the first place.

For me, the true worth is connecting with others in my field. I live remote. There are no active networking groups around me, and so the internet is the way I reach out to other professionals. When I'm able to travel three or four times a year to meet with other professionals and 'talk shop' in person, I bet my social site activity will increase and be more productive in itself because I'll be more excited about connecting with those individuals again in between travel times. And for letting others know about them.

I haven't gotten into the bookmarking sites. They say I should, but who has the time? Maybe someday I'll get those hooked up. For now, I believe I'm going to stick with four of the social sites - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Naymz (on which I have a lot to do!).

Squidoo is really becoming popular too, and I started a lens there. But really don't like the limitations of it versus building my own mini-site, and my lens is screwed up. Notified support a few weeks ago and haven't heard back yet. Really isn't worth having something I can't properly maintain. So, Squidoo gets a personal "NO" vote from me.

Wordpress is worth more than Squidoo to use. I have one - it's my main copywriting blog under title of Copy Confetti. I need to sit down and fully utilize the features on that one yet. It'll probably make this one obsolete as I get it on a better schedule.