SimplyCast: Interactive Marketing Blog

As many of you know, email marketing is an effective and inexpensive lead generation channel. But while email is very effective, it is still limited by the size of your email list.

That is where social media comes into play because it does not experience the same limitation.

With social media, your reach is equal to your followers/fans/subscribers as well as all of their connections. That makes your potential reach almost unlimited if it takes off. This is because the nature of social media is to consume and share content.

For example, if I post an update to the SimplyCast Facebook page, all of our fans can see that content. Then if they go and comment on that update, that activity is published to their newsfeed and all of their connections see that update.

If I post a link to this blog post on Twitter, all of our followers see that tweet. Then, if they retweet that content, it will be shared with all of their followers.

Are you seeing why your emails need to become good friends with social media sites?

Basically, social media gives your content rocket fuel to expand it’s reach beyond the existing list of clients. That already well crafted content will now get shared and blasted to corners of the Internet you did not know existed.

How to make it happen

So if it sounds so easy, why does it not work for everyone? Well, there is some work to be done before things blast off. Fortunately it is not something you need a PHD for.

Follow these five steps and you will be a social media pro faster than you can retweet it to your friends.

1. Figure out which social media sites your customers and potential customers use. Whether you want to believe it or not, your customers are online right now talking about your industry (and hopefully you). Figure out which sites they use the most. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are great places to start for most businesses.

2. Set up profiles on each of these websites. It’s free and only requires your time. Even if you don’t plan on acting on your social media plan right away, create your accounts now for branding purposes. It is best to reserve your company name on all of these sites immediately, before someone else takes them.

3. Add links in your emails to follow or subscribe to your social media profiles. The people already subscribing to your emails are great candidates for following you in social media, you just need to let them know that you’re there. We always add our Twitter link to all promos and as you can see, we also have it posted on this blog. Social media also gets a leg up on email in that an email address may not stick with someone as they move from one job to another, but social media profiles and subscriptions will.

4. Add links in your emails to post your content to these social media sites. Make it easy for your recipients to share the content with their networks on these social media sites. There are numerous buttons out there to use so make those links stand out. The easier it is, the more likely someone will share your work.

5. Integrate social media at all stages of the communication. Follow the user from the email to the landing page and conversion. The more places you use it, the better chance of people following or sharing.

With all this talk about social media, it would be wrong of me not to plug SimplyCast’s social accounts.

Follow SimplyCast on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Digg and we will do the same in return.

Click here to learn more about SimplyCast and how we can take your email marketing to the next level.