Internet Marketing Do’s and Don’t Ever’s

So you want to market something via the Internet, eh? Well here are some marketing rules than anyone should live by – if you want a successful marketing campaign and value your career, that is!

DO Have Social Presence

Every company should have at least two social networking site accounts, generally Facebook and/or Twitter. If not, you are not reaching nearly the audience you could be.

Don’t expect people to just stumble across your website just by searching for stuff – get your word out there via social media, let people talk your website up and the links/pagerank will naturally come in.

DON’T Have A Stale Account

So you have or just newly registered social media accounts, whooptie-fucking-doo: do you actually use them or is your last post a year ago?

People will find you using social media, what they see when they find you determines how they perceive your company. No posts lately? Must be bankrupt with a boarded-up, condemned building that crackheads have been smoking in for that past year they haven’t posted during. Sound unbelievable? Believe it.

Keep up with your accounts – even that extra $10 an hour you pay a high school grad to take pics with and run your social accounts can yield fantastic returns for your business, since people will definitely flock to you more based on those tweets/posts/blogs.

DO Engage People

When the people comment, reply or communicate with you via social media – REPLY!!! Don’t just ignore comments, engage and participate in the new community to learn what people want and need from you.

Oh, and it works both ways too – engage in people even if they aren’t engaging with you. Search tweets and publicly reply to people on tweets you can address with your company. Tag people on Facebook who have public posts on issues you can address if you can’t comment directly. Be nice and communicative, it goes a long way for your company.

And if you’re getting too many replies/comments to address them all, then just do what you can and consider social marketing a success – pop some bubbly after hours or something (but log out of your social accounts first). But read the next, crucial section please:

DON’T Spam People

There’s a fine line between what I just wrote and being considered a spammer. Replying to EVERY tweet on Twitter may be somewhat okay given the nature of Twitter, but don’t hound the same non-responsive person a thousand times. Oh, and all-caps, as our tweet said, is never a good thing.

And as far as Facebook goes, don’t flood newsfeeds with crap – that’s how people unlike you en mass. Commenting on your same post without any other comments can quickly get you labeled as pathetic and desperate, too.

As far as promoting your site via these mediums goes, be conservative about it – don’t post a link to your homepage with every post, start a blog and link to a post about a specific announcement/product.

DO Blog

On that note, blogging + social media has numerous benefits: once they hit your site, they are first introduced to the blog where your words can speak to them before they start browsing the rest of your site to get impressed into doing something.

The good thing about blogging too is the ability for key people in your company to easily post stuff in their own words that others can comment on natively or via social media comment plugins (furthering the mesh of exposure), also increasing the “surface area” of possibilities for others to reblog and community-ize your blog posts for further exposure.

That’s about it, you’d think these would be common sense but alas there is a stark reason I’m posting this – too many examples of companies that have a lot of potential but just don’t seem to “get it.” Any other do’s or don’t's? Leave a comment and let the world know! Thanks for reading.