Effective Social Network Marketing

According to its Wikipedia definition, social media marketing is "an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales."

Today, prominent social media sites include Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more 8 figure subscriber sites that are prominent within their geographical or demographical spheres of influence.

The volume of social media Web sites springing up these days is reminiscent of the competing search engines back around 2000. Some of you may remember names like Lycos, Webcrawler, Excite, Altavista, or Infoseek. Many of these engines disappeared rapidly and we will likely see similar results within the social media space.

I think it's Facebook's game to lose at this point though and their subscriber base and growth trend position the company for considerable sustained success. LinkedIn is also highly influential within the business community and may ultimately change the recruitment/job seeking landscape entirely.

Understanding the basics of social networking is critical so you can begin to think of ways your business can leverage these evolving marketing platforms, as competitive marketing differentiators.

Click here for a link of sites around the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

Click here for a link of recent Facebook statistics: (pretty astounding)
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

So, how can you integrate social media into your current strategy?

First, focus on relationship building with relevant contacts, on sites that you are comfortable with. Do not look to navigate, or even understand the entire world of social media - it is far too broad reaching and may be overwhelming, if viewed in its entirety.

There are many influential community members, lawyers and non-lawyers users of sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, who can be great potential sources of new client leads for your law practice. Social media allows you to stay in touch regularly, by posting relevant updates or news about your firm. This way, you are continually reminding contacts of your expertise in the domain, making it more likely that you will be the one they reach out to. While not everyone within your network circle will be interested in an proactively seek out your professional blog, you may still be able to share important information and updates via more personal sites like FaceBook or Twitter. For example, a blurb announcing a a recent $5 Million medical malpractice verdict may attract the attention of your banker, who has a client whose mother was recently misdiagnosed. Alternatively, a LinkedIn profile, higlighting the new organization that you are now affiliated with may cause an old business contact that you did not expect to hear from to inquire into your offering.

Also, social media opens the door to highly targeted marketing to sizeable audiences. Facebook's pay per click marketing tools, for example, enable advertisers to target a subset of its roughly 1/4 Billion user base, by interests, age, location, etc... As with any marketing tactics, you will want to test, measure and optimize to make sure you are achieving the ideal return on your investment.

There is an art to leveraging social networks to promote a product or service and most experts will advise to be very cautious in your approach, so it does not backfire. Tip: Social Media is a two-way communication channel - using it as a one way tool is ineffective and may harm your company's image Getting a contact that you met online through a social network to visit your Web site, or blog takes patience. Leverage your relationships to give your organization a human element and nurture these relationships and you will see the long term dividends.

Lastly, social media is an incredibly powerful tool for exchanging information with both peers and clients, including developments in the law, trial strategies and successes. The field of social media is still in its infancy right now and I would strongly recommend that you first get your feet wet and start taking advantage of some of the networking opportunities offered. Once you understand how to network within your social circles, you will be better positioned to grasp the strength of various opportunities to market outside of it.