Getting started with Social media promotion

[Goetzman]

Hey Guys,

I created a facebook fan page and I created a twitter account. I'm following about 175 people on twitter and 30 people returned the follow.

Now what? How can I keep building? Any tools to help me?

if you wanna analyze: http://twitter.com/culinitweets

[randfish]

It really depends on your goals from here. Are you looking to boost traffic from social sites? If so, you're going to want to learn what your audience wants and start creating it, sharing it and participating in conversations on these platforms to earn their trust and engagement.

If your goal is to provide customer service and reputation tracking/management, you can set up alerts through services like Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) and many other services (this Quora thread is quite helpful on tools that can assist on that front: http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-free-tools-available-to-track-Twitter-mentions-and-ideally-sentiment)

If you're seeking to boost SEO rankings using social media, you'll need to build up an engaged contingent of friends/followers who will share/like/tweet your content.

Some good resources include:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/social-media-marketing-facebook-twitter-arent-enough
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/comparing-seo-social-media-as-marketing-channels
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-visual-tour-through-the-basics-of-social-media-marketing

Best of luck!

[Goetzman]

Thanks for the response Rand!

I'm really looking for industry recognition, if any traffic make it to the site for a sale, that’s a bonus.

It just feels so spammy to following a bunch of people, to get them to follow me.

[Goetzman]

Subquestion: Is it bad to follow a bunch of people on twitter, to get followers too?

[damionbrown]

It happens, and I wouldn't say it's "bad" as such if it's done in the right way. Twitter is quite big on Follow Spam and I believe there are limits as to the number of new follows an account can carry out in a day.

Think of it as a value proposition you're making to someone -- you're approaching them and saying, "I see you follow company A. I'm suggesting you also follow company B."

What value do they immediately see when they quickly view your profile, your stats, and most importantly the content you've been sharing?

If you've got a tweet stream with a good amount of well-presented, varied content most of which isn't self-serving or promotional, you stand a better chance of getting the Follow back.

I guess it boils down to the idea of spending time creating your prescence and voice before going all-out on increasing the audience by any means necessary.