What has always been the simplest way to generate home based business? Referrals from existing customers with their friends and families.

Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive and most productive form of advertising. A lot of people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only 1 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a confident return on investment. Nobody under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers can make a purchasing decision in line with the input of family and friends.

Social media marketing supplies the electronic platform for word of mouth marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The common Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets venture out every week. YouTube has over 100 million views per day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more frequent today through social media than any other amount of time in the history of business. Can your company afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?

If you are like me, you learn from making mistakes. However, if you can study from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. So why not learn from the mistakes of others? Here are a few common mistakes new marketers make when trying to create and implement a social media plan:

I’ll figure it out as I go- the largest time waster is going right into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take time to get educated on social networking sites. Not all sites are designed for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very time consuming and will result in many companies abandoning their plan and walking from the strategy. Instead, learn the basics of establishing these site, understand the different options, and spend time engaging instead of fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs on the market that can teach business owners on how best to create and implement a social media plan.

Let’s add 100 sites in a single day- it’s tempting to venture out and create a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at one time. But the problem with this strategy is that should you grow too fast, you will not be able to match all the great things about each site. The best approach is to create one site, like Facebook, learn the facts and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and build relationships others. If Luxury Travel Guides set up 12 at once, you will not be as active as well as your lack of participation could defeat your overall goal. It’s easier to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social media sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.

Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with individuals who don’t have complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, lots of people will find you before they find your site. If they find your site and you have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or hardly any personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile is your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most of all, be personable.

Here’s the pitch- here’s the largest stumbling block for some beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This kind of media is really a huge mistake and you will be ignored if you try this on social media. Traditional one way marketing practices are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a new medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Instead of selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself being an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For example, if you are an agent, instead of promoting yourself and your site, educate homeowners on which they can do to market a house themselves. The truth is, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By providing valuable information, you’ll become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is ready to sell their house, they will probably ask for your services.

Same method of communication- not everyone receives information through exactly the same medium. Some people like to read, others like video, and some people will be attracted to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up the way you post. If you to put it simply out a blog each day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. For those who have a blog 1 day, then put up a simple video another. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you’ll achieve.

Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media activity. This doesn’t mean that you must make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal is to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, you’ll find it’s better to have 1 post each day than 3 days with 10 posts.

Do it all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I would use to talk to people. Needing to log into multiple accounts every day to check on the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The truth is, it became to time consuming to do this and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load all of my email accounts into Outlook, I could efficiently check and make use of the benefits of email. The same applies to social media. When you have to log into and log from 5 different social media sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that may allow you to log into all of your social media makes up about interactions may be the easiest way to ensure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are some good all-in-one social media dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social media efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner seeking to create a social media plan for your business, then you absolutely should educate yourself on how to utilize the technology and find tools to assist you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to build a house and you don’t possess a hammer, that house isn’t going to get built. By taking the steps listed above in this posting, you will be able to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media marketing plan.