Social media marketing is a key component in an effective inbound marketing strategy, but its important to capture the right voice on your social media sites.
Sure, you want people to know that you are a serious professional with all the expertise necessary to help them with their financial decisions, but that is not all that you want to accomplish. You also want potential clients to get to know you personally and feel that they can trust you. Social media offers an opportunity to do both, but only if you strike the right balance on each of your sites.
Here are three guidelines to help you grow and sustain a social media following:
1. Decide on a definite focus for each of your social sites. My suggestion is to let your Facebook business page be the place where you show charitable work, personal interests and even family news items from you and your staff members, as well as events in your community. Load your LinkedIn profile with a bit more serious financial information. Twitter is a great place to link to interesting articles, quotes and news reports that may impact your followers.
2. Post something, somewhere, every day. Dont let even a few days go by without adding fresh content to your sites, or people will simply stop coming. There are many ways to schedule posts and tweets in advance so that you dont have to think about it several times a day. And remember that you can link to one article, video or other piece of content in a variety of posts and tweets.
3. Focus more on relationships than sales. Social media is a place to build relationships; your office is a place to conduct business. Use social media sites as a forum for conversations, as a place to showcase your unique personality and style, and as a reference center where followers can always find an interesting fact or a thoughtful quote or article. In this low-key environment relationships will flourish and business will be an inevitable result.
Inbound marketing involves disseminating valuable information through several channels to a well-defined market that attracts prospects and inspires them to reach out to you. The more savvy you are about your social media sites, the more successful you will be in building lasting relationships with your followers.
Craig Faulkner is CEO of
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