Social Media Marketing is taking the world by storm, and if you are a small business professional, you absolutely need to be in front of this trend to expand and grow your business in this new economy.  First of all, most social networking websites are FREE, which makes it very easy to get started, and secondly, when you know what you are doing you can get a steady flow of leads pouring into your inbox every single day!

Here are the top 4 social networking sites that you should use to get started, and as you increase your knowledge on how to use these websites, you can get more advanced to create even greater results, but the key for now is to at least get started!

FACEBOOK

http://www.facebook.com/recordbreaker

I use this as my primary source to build my network.  Make sure to choose a local network to join and then use the profile search tool to find people in your area based on key criteria from their profile.  You can also join several local groups, and connect with like-minded people there as well.  Be sure not to add too many friends in a day, or you will get a warning message to stop.  They key is to be consistently adding targeted friends in your local market until you have built a good following, and then to invite them to relevant events, pages & groups that you create.  This is beyond effective once you know what you are doing.

TWITTER

http://www.twitter.com/chrisrecord

This is currently the fastest growing social networking site on the web, so it makes sense to ride the wave that Twitter has created.  Everytime that you create a blog post on Wordpress, you can automatically post it to your Twitter account as well.  There are many built in features with Twitter that help you connect your “tweets” to other sites and vice versa.  I believe that this site is really still in it’s infancy and over the next several months we will see several new features that make it even more effective for business.  For now, be sure to have an account set up, and to follow several like-minded people, and many of them will most likely follow you as well.

YOUTUBE

http://www.youtube.com/facebook4business

I am surprised how many professionals do not currently use YouTube to promote their business.  As an entrepreneur there are many creative ways that YouTube will help you grow your client list by creating and promoting viral videos.  Start by setting up a channel and uploading any videos that you currently have.  Start off every video description with a link to your website or blog, and then be very descriptive and include relevant keywords in your description.  Then write about your video on these social networking sites and embed it on your blog to create more traffic and views.  Think about it this way, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand pictures!

WORDPRESS

http://www.chrisrecord.com

Your blog on Wordpress will get great organic search positioning as well as helping to retain your audience with comments and interaction.  WP is always working towards integrating posts with other social media sites, making it worth your time to write posts because of the possibility for viral distribution.  The key with Wordpress is to take advantage of all of the free plug-ins available to help your site get maximum SEO positioning, as well as social media integration.  Once you learn the basic process of what it takes to create a quality blog post, you will quickly create a habit and managing your blog will feel like nothing.  Owning your own name as a domain name should also be your #1 move if you are branding yourself.

1. Create a powerful viral video and upload it to your YouTube channel and write a killer keyword rich description for it and be sure to include a link(s) back to your wordpress blog
2. Then, embed that video to your Wordpress blog and add keyword rich authentic content describing the video in a compelling to way to get comments and feedback.
3. Next you want to update the status on your Facebook personal profile, your Facebook business page, and of course your Twitter profileas well with a link to your blog post or video.
4. Be sure to interact and respond to all of the comments on your sites and find creative ways to promote your article via multiple social networks and resources.
5. Do your best to get other popular blogs and websites to link directly to your new article to build link popularity and help with top google positioning for your relevant keywords.

And with that you are off and running!  You will have more questions as you get yourself going with these websites, and every answer you could possibly look for can most likely be found at Google and YouTube.  Don’t you love the power of the internet :)

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Become a Fan of Chris Record on Facebook @ http://www.Facebook.com/RecordBreaker

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