Self-Marketing Your Brand - Learning from Pros

An avid Mashable fan, Linda talks about a recent article about marketing brands for clients...and how you can apply some principles for yourself as you market your goods and services.

What I Learned from Those Links

Following those five links, I learned the following information as it applied to me and to my own marketing online:

1. I was reinforced with the knowledge that it doesn't pay to whine or gloat online in any social media format. Successes are wonderful and should be shared, but the tone is important.
2. Make relationships, not pitches. Frankly, if you make a pitch online through Twitter or Facebook (especially the latter, where I cultivate friendships that may or may not have anything to do with business), I will drop you.
3. That only 1 percent of my followers (relationships) may help me promote my work, even if it is THEIR work that I'm promoting (not pitching).

There is a fine line between pitching and promoting. Pitching is a blatant reach to viewers to buy, read or otherwise participate in a given venue for a specific product or service. Promotion, on the other hand, seeks out a specific market to push the same.

The difference between pitching and promotion has altered the way I link to something through Twitter or Facebook. If I know that a certain article or link will interest my friends and followers, I'll promote it. If I write an article that will not interest my friends, I won't 'pitch' it to them. But, I will share an article I've written that may pique their interest.

This selective process for sharing links has led to a certain reliability...my friends and followers can count on me (for the most part – unless I have a bad hair day) to supply them with credible information. So, when it comes to promoting something – such as an article or a product or service – my friends usually take a peek, at least, to see if that link interests them.

The 1-percent Rule

Just an aside on the 1-percent information found at the influencer identification link. Recently, a friend  started a publishing company. She had a grand opening this past week, and she broadcast her online event via Twitter and Facebook. I did not monitor her Twitter response, but her Facebook response seemed to fit the bill...

While she was on top of sharing her links to various pages in her site during that grand opening (including links to discounts), few followers shared that link (at this point, I was the only one), and few of her own authors shared the link. You would think that her authors would be on top of the promotion for their own books, but – as I've learned – some of her authors still don't know how to work their way around Facebook, let alone Twitter.

So, pay attention to that article at Mashable on influencer identification. That 1-percent influence is your lifeline to better reach, especially if they are active on social networks. While you may not have enough followers now (and, therefore, a low one-percent reach), you still can pursue the activities that Mashable suggests in that article just to ingrain their information. You may need it down the road.

Finally, Follow the Comments

If you read the article at Mashable, did you scroll down to read the comments? Make it a practice to read comments after any article that interests you. I'll be the first to tell you that authors don't know everything...and comments can add to your enrichment in reading, even when they're spam.

Marketers who comment with "spam" often provide links to businesses where you would pay for services. But, along the way, some marketers might also share valuable information. It never hurts to follow the links to learn what professionals actually do to monitor social networking results, too. In fact, I find comments calling out spam more annoying than the actual 'spam.'

In this certain article's case, the comments at Facebook were more enlightening than the comments on Mashable's actual site. In those Facebook comments, I learned:

1. Google Analytics, a free tool, still leads the way in learning about your online stats.
2. Google Alerts, another free tool, comes in second.
3. Someone mentioned A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions, a great tool to learn about social networking monitoring tools.

In the conclusion, I'll mention some other specific tools mentioned in the Facebook comments. For now, I hope that you get the drift on how to monitor your site and how to use corporate tools a personal level for your own business. Just ramp it down to fit monitoring into your own schedule.

I'll admit this – promotion for a product is less time consuming than promotion for services, especially if you provide all the services yourself. It takes far less time to sell a book online than it does to create a Web site, in other words. So, build your social network, but don't rely on it for all your marketing until you feel comfortable with the amount of time you can put toward monitoring your efforts.

Without monitoring, you are reaching out too far and you may end up falling from lack of balance, face first. Into mud. Trust me. Been there. Done that.