For businesses, social media has become the go-to online solution. It allows you to take use of people’s innate interconnectedness, which makes spreading messages extremely successful. You can use both free and paid methods to include social media marketing into your networking business. Social media is really effective. It will enable you to reach more individuals than ever before. Network marketers in the past would look at social media with awe, and they would be correct in doing so.
There are numerous channels and tactics available for social media marketing, and they should be linked together to fully use the potential of social media. A blog with high-quality material should serve as the foundation for your social media activities. Returning to our branding part, you should use your blog to establish your brand, either for the product and niche you are engaged with, or as a tool to market the business and recruit new members.
The best method is to have two different blogs for this reason, but the blog for recruiting new members will most likely update more slowly than the product blog. Too many network marketers become overly focused on recruiting their downline; remember that you are first and foremost running a retail business. Blog traffic grows slowly, but once it starts, it may really start rolling downhill like a snowball.
You should post articles on your topic and products on a daily basis, and as we’ll see, your posts should be linked to your social media profiles. You can utilize direct promotion to help people find your recruiting blog by posting once or twice each week. Both blogs should be connected to one another.
In this article, we’ll explore different platforms that can help you grow your network marketing business.
Blog
While it seems passé, a traditional website and blog will be the core of your business. An online presence can help drive higher levels of sales, often from prospects that you’ll never meet in person. There are many alternatives available for setting up online stores and blogs, including Wix, Weebly, and Shopify. Blogs can often be integrated into these online shops directly. Your blog should tie directly with the shop, discussing the niche and specific products in your line.
You should also set up a separate blog and website for your recruiting efforts. That site and blog can be relatively static. Post articles that explain the opportunity and how to contact you if people are interested. You can cross-link between your recruiting blog and the main product blog so that people who are interested in the products and may be open to joining your network marketing organization can read about it. Also, you want to capture prospects that come across your recruiting blog that might be interested in buying and trying out the products.
Your blog will be the focal point of your online presence, and you will link back to it from your presence on social media and vice versa. The blog will form the backbone of comments on your Facebook page, but of course, it does not have to be the only source of content for the Facebook page.
Over the past decade, Facebook has taken the world by storm, and with good reason. Facebook provides an unprecedented opportunity for you to promote your networking marketing business. The first step in doing this is to visit Facebook business to create a business identity for yourself – if you want to. The first thing to note is that a small business can’t just go and create a Facebook account; you have to use your personal account to start.
That said, you can create Facebook pages that are publicly distinct and separate from your personal Facebook account. How you set this up is up to you, and some network marketers prefer to tie everything together publicly. You can invite friends and family to like your network marketing Facebook page to help generate some early publicity, but remember that when someone likes your Facebook page, they will see everything you post on it show up on their timeline. For this reason, some network marketers prefer to keep things separate so that their personal friends and family don’t feel like they are shoving the network marketing business down their throats. This is something you will have to decide for your own personal situation.
Before you create your Facebook page, you should post 10-20 articles on your product/niche blog that are rich in content. The content doesn’t have to be entirely your own, and an easy way to start getting content on a blog is to embed relevant YouTube videos on the blog and write your own commentary below the video.
Being original is important; however, even if you are commenting on a video made by someone else. Another good source of content is to post book reviews for related book stores that either promote your niche or work in network marketing itself. Top 10 lists are a good way to add original content and also rise up in search engines.
After you have created your blog articles, begin dripping them onto your Facebook page. Put about 2-3 per day – on your Facebook page, put a short comment that describes what the blog post is about, and then add a link to the blog article. It’s good to have images at the top of each blog article, Facebook looks for them and shows them on the Facebook page in the post.
The backlinks to your blog will help improve the standing of your blog articles in search engines.
You can also post products in your Shopify or other stores on your Facebook page, to help drive traffic to your online sales presence. Do this sparingly, and you want to use the blog and Facebook page to build a friendly rapport with your customers rather than pushing sales at them aggressively. A reasonable rule to follow is 3-4 posts of CONTENT followed by one post promoting a product. Often an excuse to post a product is a good reason to put one up – such as offering a coupon or special discount if you are able to offer them.
The true power of Facebook is to expand your audience using advertising. You can run periodic advertising campaigns that are relatively inexpensive. The ads can go to your Facebook page (a “likes” campaign), to your blog, or to your online store. You will want to run all three types of campaigns and possibly some others as well. A likes campaign can be very effective, remember that when people like your page then they’ll see your future posts on their timeline, and many will share relevant posts with friends bringing more customers.
What really generates power in Facebook advertising is being able to laser target your prospects. You can do this in multiple ways, such as targeting by location, gender, and age. So if you wanted to advertise your skin care products to women aged 35-54 living in Dallas, you could do that. Or you could target a different product to women 65+ living in Florida. The possibilities are literally endless.
You can also target people who have expressed interest in network marketing so Facebook ads can be used as a downline recruiting tool. As discussed previously, you should set up so-called “lead” or “landing” pages. These are simple one-page websites that offer a “free gift” in exchange for the visitor providing contact information. Your free gift can be anything including a physical product, but digital products such as a book or guide in PDF format about your niche are quite acceptable and commonly given. However, if you can afford to do it a free physical product (with the prospect paying for shipping) can also be an effective way to draw in prospects.
The key is to collect the email address so that you can put the person in your automated sales funnel.
So, you will create a Facebook ad with a video. You can create a video to showcase a product or have a short video that simply promotes it. If you are recruiting for the downline, you can use videos where you talk to the camera describing your operation, or maybe your company even has videos and images you can use in Facebook ads for this purpose.
Be careful in the way you describe the business. Facebook may have unfair policies regarding network marketing or MLM businesses. For example, they don’t allow you to advertise “work from home” opportunities so you will have to be clever in how you present it so that prospects get the message, but the Facebook censors don’t get triggered.
YouTube
YouTube is one of the most powerful social media platforms around. People are visual, and so, they automatically get drawn to video. Your videos don’t have to be fancy, simply set up a clean place to shoot. You can even use a smartphone to shoot the video – professional presentations are not required. In fact, an amateurish video seems more real which is why so many YouTubers build up huge audiences of fans with simple videos.
Below your YouTube video, you should include a link to your online store, to your blog, and to your Facebook page. You can also embed links directly in your video. Don’t be shy about asking prospects to close the sale – they need the call to action.
It doesn’t end there; you want to build a link circle with every presence you have online. This will help pull you up among the search engines. So after posting a video, create a blog post based on the video and link back to your YouTube page from the blog. Then do the same on your Facebook page and any other social media presence you have.
For the network marketer, YouTube should play a central role. You can live stream, demonstrate products, and recruit new distributors using YouTube videos. Moreover, you can use your YouTube videos as advertisements on YouTube, appearing on other channels. This will let you laser target prospects in much the same way that you laser target people on Facebook. You can even target specific videos and channels where your ads are going to be shown.
So if you have a skincare product you’re pitching, you can advertise it on other videos discussing skin care products. Advertising on YouTube is very inexpensive as well; you can get thousands of video views for a few dollars. If you are going to use YouTube, you should enroll in a course that teaches you how to get your keywords, titles, and everything correct so that your videos don’t languish in obscurity. Udemy is a good place to look for courses.
Instagram is another very popular social media network. You can promote primarily using images on Instagram, but you can also post “stories” which are short vertical videos. Search online for a marketing tool that is designed to create professional story videos, and then you can post them on your Instagram account.
However, the best way to leverage Instagram is to make deals for people to post your material on their accounts. Instagram users that have large numbers of followers are willing to post other people’s material for a fixed amount of time for small fees. Make sure that anyone you approach for such a deal has a minimum of 50,000 followers, and that they will post a link back to your shop, sales page, blog, or YouTube video.
Typically an advertised post like this will be up for 12-24 hours. These are independent deals you make directly with the popular person who has an Instagram account. You can probably find deals for $35 or so, but prices may vary considerably depending on the individual you are dealing with. You can also find professional marketing agencies that will help you get promotion through “social influencers” if you prefer that approach, which can help you get a post on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram simultaneously.
You can also advertise on Instagram, but this is done through Facebook. So, create a Facebook ad if you want to advertise on Instagram. Keep in mind that Instagram has a younger audience, so whether or not you will use them may depend on part on who your prospects are. Ages 18-29 are going to be the dominant age group on Instagram, but that isn’t to say there aren’t others from different age groups as well.
LinkedIn can be a very effective platform for recruiting new members for your downline. You can run a blog or advertise on Linked in and target people appropriately. As with other social media platforms, you can backlink to other parts of your online presence. However, LinkedIn will be the most useful when you are recruiting new distributors, not for advertising your products.
Twitter can also be a part of your overall online strategy. It’s not a platform that you can depend entirely on. While you could rely completely on Facebook or YouTube, Twitter will serve a different, more supportive role. You can use it to help boost blog posts and videos.
You can use Twitter to pitch both your products and niche as well as recruit new members. Twitter posts should always link back to your main website or blog, or the YouTube video you are trying to promote. Posting on Twitter is a good and easy thing to do, but it’s not recommended at this time that you spend money on Twitter advertising. That may change in the future.
This is another sharing site that is sort of like Instagram, in that it’s a place where you can post images and link back to your sites.
Instagram is mobile-oriented, but Pinterest is older and more internet oriented.
Search advertising
Search advertising can be a big part of your online presence. This will work especially well with getting prospects that are in the mind to buy right now. You will need to do keyword research for your niche because search advertising is based on keywords. You need to be ready when you do this, so test and optimize the page you are going to point to with your advertisement before launching a campaign. We say be ready because search advertising can generate large amounts of traffic very quickly, depending on what you use to set your spending parameters and bids.
Obviously, Google is the go-to network for search advertising; however, you may consider the Bing network, which will run your ads on Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.
Bing is going to be cheaper than Google Adwords and will still reach a large number of customers. However, if you can afford it be sure to advertise on Google as well.