The Ten Commandments of Social Media Marketing

1. Listen

You've heard it before - you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. For social media it's even more important to do more listening and less talking. You should listen to what people are saying and join their discussions to find out what's important to them. Only then can you create something that adds value rather than just adding clutter to their lives.

2. Focus

Don't be tempted to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media strategy has a better chance for success than something that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. Aim for Quality

Quality trumps quantity every time. It's far more effective to have one hundred connections who rengage with your content than ten thousand who do nothing.

4. Be Patient

Social media success doesn't happen overnight. The path to achieving results is a long one, but starts with that single step.

5. Be Interesting

If you publish interesting, quality content and build your audience of followers, they'll share it with their own followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more. This sharing of your content gives new entry points for Google and more ways for people to find you online.

6. Use Influence

If you find the online influencers in your segment (those who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in ywhat you do) you should connect with those people and work to build a relationship with them. If you appear an interesting source of useful information they could share your content with their own followers and lend their own authority to you, which would put you in front of a huge new audience.

7. Add Value

You need to add value to the conversation. If you spend all your time promoting your own products and services before long people will stop listening. Aim to focus less on immediate conversions and more on creating content you're proud of and developing relationships with online influencers.

8. Be Nice

Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so make sure to acknowledge someone if they connect with you, or if you mention them in one of your posts.

9. Share and Share Alike

You can't expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don't do the same for them. Spend some of the time you spend on social media sharing and talking about content published by others.

10. Be Available

Be available to your audience - don't publish your content and then disappear. That means you need to consistently publish content and then participate in conversations. Followers can become unfollowers if you're off the grid.

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