30 Tips on Social Media Marketing 2011

Hubspot has compiled a list of 30 brilliant tips that will help you in your social media marketing plan, here is a taste of the tips with the top 10:

1. Write blog content for your target audience, which is not necessarily yourself. This happens with startups a lot. They blog about being entrepreneurs, which is great – if your target audience is entrepreneurs. Blog about the things that your community wants to know about. (Source: Mark Suster)

2. If you’re going to use social media for customer service, mirror your hours of operation on Twitter to the hours of operation you have for your support team. (Source: Jeff Esposito)

3. Measure social media ROI by analyzing how it performs compared to more established channels or advertising methods. It’s not comparing apples-to-apples when it comes to cost, but you can compare the quality of traffic they drive to your website. (Source: The Next Web)

4. Mobile check-in deals aren’t just for restaurants and bars. See how one medical practice creatively offered a special to his tech-savvy patients for checking in. It’s something any small business marketer can learn from. (Source: Mashable)

5. How frequently you blog does count. Businesses that blog daily generate 5 times more traffic than those that post only weekly or daily. (Source: Social Media Examiner) Bonus tip: need ideas for all that content? Here’s 100 of them to get you started.

6. Hashtag-stuffing tweets doesn’t work. A study from Argyle Social shows that (in their sample) tweets with hashtags got 5% fewer click-throughs than those without hashtags. (Source: Social Media B2B)

7. If you follow more people than are following you, you could harm your Twitter account’s SEO potential. Search engines “trust” those with more Twitter influence, and following many more people than follow you isn’t always an indicator of that. (Source: Marketing Profs)

8. Building an online community? Show your power users that you appreciate their contributions. Do this by asking them for feedback, offering prizes and giveaways, and actually saying “thank you” for their interactions, mentions, and good content. (Source: Social Media Today)

9. Blog about the problems your product or service solves – not about the product or service. No one cares about you (yet.) Everyone cares about their own problems and if your product or service can help. (Source: Social Fresh)

10. Think of marketing as storytelling, and think of your customers as the characters. Think about what motivates them. Measure what patterns they display. Let their actions, wants, and needs drive the story. (Source: Joey Strawn)

Full 30 list >>