Social Media & Email Marketing P B & J

While Social Media is the best thing since sliced bread to promote small business, one of the rules of social media etiquette is ‘Do Not Advertise’ which leaves business owners scratching their heads trying to figure out how advertise their products/services and how to integrate Social Media with their other Internet Marketing efforts.

Social Networks are for connecting and interacting with your market, building brand awareness and sharing information NOT for sales pitches.

I have put together some tips on how Social Media Marketing and Newsletter/Email marketing can fit together like peanut butter and jam.

Connect The Dots – Put links to your network profiles into emails/newsletters so that people can connect with you on your networks.

Educate & Entertain – Put together a special informational email series and promote it with a link to your email sign-up page through tweets and social network status updates.

Make It Accessible -  Add the the html sign-up code for your newsletters to your Facebook profile, Facebook Business Page and other networking sites

Whatcho Talkin’ ‘Bout? – Search your social media sites to discover what the hot topics are and include them in your Newsletters.

Do Your Homework – Research your social networks to find out which products or services that you offer are in demand so that you can ‘strike while the iron is hot’ by sending out offers that are relevant and timely. Here’s a great post by Socialableblog.com that gives you great tools to research with http://www.sociableblog.com/2009/04/29/100-tips-and-tools-to-research-the-social-web

Play Sharezees – Viralize your emails by adding a SWYN (Share with Your Network) link to them (along side the Forward to a Friend link) allowing people to share your email with their social network groups and connections. Unfortunately, there is only a handful of email marketing and autoresponder services currently offering SWYN links but more services are adding this feature every day.

Using these two marketing channels to compliment each other will help give you the advantage in your online marketing efforts. Now just cut off the crusts and add a glass of chocolate milk.

Mmmmmmmm….