Social Media Marketing Demystified Wrap-up!

The Fall 2013 Ticket Summit® Plus webinar series kicked off yesterday with Social Media Marketing Demystified, an hour-long webinar led by email and social marketing expert Ron Cates of Constant Contact. In this webinar, he provided practical tips and best practices for promoting your business across a variety of platforms.

Throughout the webinar, Cates emphasized the importance of integrating your social media efforts with your email marketing campaigns. Use a separate email to announce your presence on a social network, and be sure to include links to all of your networks in your emails, he suggested. He also emphasized the importance of making your newsletter content shareable, which will automatically increase your readership.

Cates also stressed the importance of providing content that people want to read, rather than sales pitches or grabs for shares and likes. He says to aim to “inspire trust” by providing your followers with content that is relevant to them and their business. “Everyone has content,” he says, and recommends asking yourself questions customers might ask about your product, business, or industry to generate potential content. This kind of content does not take long to write, but will drastically increase your marketing ROI.

The webinar concluded with Cates’ recommendations for tools to improve your social measurement. Personally, Cates uses Google Alerts and TweetDeck to monitor sentiment about his brands. He also recommends NutshellMail, which sends recaps of activity and allows you to respond to posts right from your inbox. Constant Contact provides numerous resources to help you build your following.

Follow Ron Cates on Twitter at @roncates or connect with him on his blog.