Social Media Checklist
February 26, 2010 in Branding by Sham Srinivas
It is okay for an upcoming venture to not have clients, funding, employees or even revenues! But it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to book an entrepreneur under criminal offense for not leveraging social media!
Today one can afford to not spend even a dime on marketing and promotional activities and yet build up a significant clientele by ensuring significant presence on the internet. But online marketing is a double edged sword as one could always get carried away and create spam which would certainly put the target audience off! However, it is imperative to create a checklist of social media websites on which to be present. The reason being that, in haste, one might end up ignoring certain communities on which presence is viewed as a given.
Here is a checklist for all you budding entrepreneurs out there:

LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals. Apart from adding impressive connections, one can make one’s presence felt by posing intelligent questions in the Answers section. This can be accessed by stalling the pointer on the More button, present on the toolbar at the top of the website, which displays a drop down list comprising of various sections like Companies, Answers, Learning Center, Reading List by Amazon, Events and SlideShare Presentations. One can also answer the various Questions posed by other members and receive the badge of being a subject expert. You should also recommend your colleagues even if they haven’t recommended you as this increases your visibility among corporates. You can also upload some of your best presentations using SlideShare as could surely go a long way in impressing potential funding partners. Also keep updating your status, sharing reading lists and wish connections on their birthdays. LinkedIn also suggests that you must insist your colleagues to recommend you. The reason is that recommended individuals are three times more likely to be featured in search results.
Tweet about your latest activities and posts. Another good idea is to release pro duct and service information using Twitter. You can also retweet articles written by other bloggers to promote them. But remember to credit the original poster while retweeting. Suppose you want to retweet this article, you can do so by using this simple syntax – RT: @Sham Social Media Checklist. Only retweet those articles which genuinely interest you and add value to your followers. And quite importantly, retweeting will also help you to build relationships with the original poster.
Social book marking sites (SBS)
Search engine bots of Google, Yahoo and MSN visit those web resources which are submitted on social book marking sites such as Stumbleupon, Digg, Sphinn and Reddit much quicker than resources which have been promoted using other means. Tagging your sites using keywords will ensure that a lot of traffic from SBS will be directed to your website.
Multimedia
Upload an interesting video about your business on Youtube or Viddler. One can also share presentations on Slideshare and Scribd. If you have come up with a peppy jingle about your product/service, it can be uploaded on websites like Sharethemusic and The Hype Machine.
Create a Facebook Page about your start-up and update it regularly. You can read more about this here.
Blogs
One can easily create a blog using Wordpress or Blogger. Maintaining an attractive blog goes a long way in creating a strong brand on the internet. You can also monetize your blog using Google Adsense or Adbrite. Another way to make money is to upload banners provided by mGinger on your blog.
The aforementioned points should help wet your feet in the sea of social media marketing. Once you are able to carve your niche, the sea becomes an ocean and offers limitless opportunities for propagating your idea to the world. And the best part is, it will cost you peanuts!









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