Facebook Ads Not Social Media Marketing

Facebook is emerging the 500  pound marketing gorilla no marketer, company or brand worth their salt can ignore when deploying a social media marketing campaign.

But, it’s painful to see so many marketers and brands relying solely on Facebook Quizzes, Contest, Sweepstakes and Sign Up Forms as a substitute for a comprehensive social media marketing campaign that will really generate some brand buzz!!

Leverage Content Across the Social Landscape

Effective Social Media Marketing campaigns involve cross promoting your content across multiple platforms, not just Facebook.

If using video content for brand building,  it should be embedded with your Facebook page, linked to via a Twitter post (rinse and repeat these folks have ADD), inserted into a Blog post and distributed across targeted groups you belong to via LinkedIn.

Don’t forget working your blog into a social media marketing campaign - tell the story via you blog then echo this content across the social web (Twitter, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn) with text on these other sites that is keyword optimized.

Complement YouTube

Don’t think that your YouTube account is the epicenter of the video world - it’s important, but you can extend your digital touch-points further. Think about TubeMogul for broader distribution of your video content to reach more incremental eyeballs.

YouTube’s 12.7 Billion videos also can make it harder for your videos to be found and generate traffic - every point of refuge has its price.

And, don’t forget about optimizing your videos with titles, keywords and descriptions to generate more traffic - don’t send those videos out into the cold digital world without some backup.

Social Media Marketing Morphing to Engagement

Twitter and Facebook are emerging as brand listening and engagement posts. An effective social media marketing campaign has shifted from first generation “post and push”  to upload, engage, analyze and respond.

Savvy brands are soliciting feedback from these communities, listening to what is being said via social sentiment (positive and negative words) analysis. Then, engaging with these communities to drive marketing ROI and creating “community advocates” who sing their brand’s praises far and wide across the social landscape.

Takeaways - let your brand run free, effective social media marketing is  more than contests, sweepstakes, sign ups on one platform.

It’s cross platform, with a broad community focused,can be multimedia, should involve your blog and you may even want to build in traditional marketing elements like PR and Email campaigns.