Mediaboss Marketing

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It's vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and -- perhaps most importantly -- your bottom line.

1. The Law of Listening Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audiences online content and join discussions to learn whats important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus Its better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality Quality trumps quantity. Its better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience Social media and content marketing success doesnt happen overnight. While its possible to catch lightning in a bottle, its far more likely that youll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, theyll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Law of Value If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

8. The Law of Acknowledgment You wouldnt ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so dont ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9. The Law of Accessibility Dont publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they wont hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Law of Reciprocity You cant expect others to share your content and talk about you if you dont do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.

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10 Laws of Social Media Marketing - Entrepreneur