What has always been the most effective way to generate new business? Referrals from existing customers with their friends and families.

Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive and most productive form of advertising. A lot of people tune out traditional method of advertising. Only one 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a confident return on investment. No one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers can make a purchasing decision based on the input of family and friends.

Social media marketing supplies the electronic platform for word of mouth marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The common Facebook user has 130 friends and is linked to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets go out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more prevalent today through social media marketing than any other amount of time in the annals of business. Can your organization afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?

If you’re like me, you learn from making mistakes. However, if you can study from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. Why not learn from the mistakes of others? Here are several common mistakes new marketers make when attempting to create and implement a social media plan:

I’ll figure it out when i go- the largest time waster is going into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take the time to get educated on social networking sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all of the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will result in many business owners abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the fundamentals of establishing these site, understand the different options, and spend your time engaging instead of fixing problems. There are good online educational programs out there that are designed to teach business owners on how to create and implement a social media plan.

Let’s add 100 sites in a single day- it’s tempting to go out Buy Twitter Followers and develop a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at once. But the problem with this particular strategy is that should you grow too fast, you will not be able to keep up with all the great things about each site. The very best approach would be to create one site, like Facebook, learn the facts and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, participate in events, and build relationships others. If you set up 12 at once, you will not be as active as well as your lack of participation could defeat your current goal. It’s easier to have one or two 2 completely utilized social networking sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.

Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with people who don’t possess complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, many people will find you before they find your site. If they find your site and you also have a pic of your logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will most likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most of all, be personable.

Here’s the pitch- here’s the biggest stumbling block for some beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This kind of media is really a huge mistake and you will be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional one way marketing practices are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a fresh medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Instead of selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself as an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For instance, if you are an agent, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to market a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By providing valuable information, you will become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell his or her house, they will most likely ask for your services.

Same method of communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people like to read, others like video, plus some people will be attracted to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up the way you post. If you simply put out a blog every day, your followers will become blind to your communication method. Change it up a little. For those who have a blog 1 day, then put up a straightforward video another. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you’ll achieve.

Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media activity. This doesn’t imply that you have to make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal is to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, you’ll find it’s easier to have 1 post per day than 3 days with 10 posts.

Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I’d use to communicate with people. Needing to log into multiple accounts every day to check on the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The truth is, it became to frustrating to get this done and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load most of my email accounts into Outlook, I could efficiently check and utilize the benefits of email. The same applies to social media. If you have to log into and log from 5 different social media marketing sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your level of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that will allow you to log into all of your social media makes up about interactions may be the easiest way to ensure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are a few good all-in-one social media marketing dashboards that will allow you to streamline your accounts and social networking efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner seeking to create a social media plan for your business, then you absolutely should learn how to use the technology and find tools to work with you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to build a house and you don’t have a hammer, that house isn’t likely to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in this posting, it will be easy to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media marketing plan.