Tip 1. Prepare a Bank of Post

You are going to be busy but you still want your name getting out there.  Think about the types of messages you want to send out during this busy time of the year, when you want to send them, and how you want to send them.  Don’t forget #hashtags for tweets and tagging for Facebook messages.

Tip 2. Add Social Sharing

Add social sharing buttons to product pages if you don’t already have them and on thank you pages so users can share what they just bought. Offer posting options onto a users Facebook page with discounts for their friends and family, or suggest users tweet the latest coupon for your site.

Tip 3. Start Writing Great Content to Share

Try posting great content on your site and share on social media to engage with users before, during and after the holidays.

Tip 4. Start Giving

Tis the time of year to help others. If you haven’t already throughout about a charity your company will donate to you should do it now.

From food drives and clothing drives to volunteering and donating money, there are many things your brand can do to get into the spirit of giving. Add a social spin to your actions and live tweet during volunteering events, match dollar for dollar donations on Facebook, create a contest, or get your fans/followers to vote on a charity.

Tip 5. Exclusive Content

Offering an exclusive deal for Facebook or Twitter fans or exclusive content only able to be viewed by fans is something that some brands have found to work well – no matter the time of year. Think about what types of exclusive content you can provide to your fans or followers that they’d be interested in. Is it a coupon only for them, or maybe an infographic or game only fans can see on Facebook?

What are you going to do to get the word out about your business this holiday season?

The initiative is called the Camry Effect, which provides a custom platform for owners to share memories related to their vehicles. While the conversation begins on the company’s website, Toyota encourages Camry owners to tweet their memories via a sharing button the Toyota website. Owners can also share the content they create on Facebook and track the attention it receives from friends and other contacts.

Social media marketing campaigns have become successful due to the brand accessibility they offer potential customers, and this a social marketing lesson companies across industries can learn from.

“We recognized the need to give Americans a smart, safe and worry-free vehicle they can rely on, and our marketing campaign communicates this message,” Bill Fay, group vice president of marketing for Toyota, said in a release.

Allowing owners to share their thoughts on the Camry will likely compel them to consider a Camry when they make their next car purchase – and perhaps it will drive their non-Camry-owner friends to do the same.

Story from Brafton.com

How effective do you think this campaign will be?

Tip 1. Organize Your Team

You need to decide who is managing which accounts.  That way, when someone ask a question on your networks, they don’t get multiple answers back.

Tip 2. Geo-Target

Never under-estimate the power of local.  Did you know that almost all tweets are now geo-tagged even if not sent from a phone?  Use this to your advantage by searching what’s being said about your industry in your location.  A restaurant monitoring all tweets about their cafe within 20 miles has a perfect chance to send someone a “thanks for eating at my restaurant, mention this tweet code and get 10% off your next meal!”

Tip 3. Stop ignoring LinkedIn

There is a big marketing opportunity with LinkedIn.  Start LinkedIn Groups and start building a following around your brand, and post to it regularly.

Tip 4. Give Credit

RSS posting is a great way to keep information going out to your followers and fans, but what if the information is not yours? Make sure to mark “RT @ ” the person, or “So and so wrote a great post.”  People like to be mentioned, and there’s a good chance if you’re posting someone’s feed, they will post yours in return, so let them know!

Tip 5. Be Regular

It’s important to have content going out to hit all the time zones you need to interact with.  Schedule some posts up for when you’re away to keep all corners of the world engaged.  Just be sure to be ready to respond as soon as you get your computer started the next day.

What tip has helped you succeed?

The media is already dissecting yesterday’s Facebook event, where the company unveiled major new changes to their platform. Par for the course, really. Drama always accompanies any change to the Facebook site or platform.

But I see drama brewing in a place unaccustomed to it, and involving a different kind of media — the media buying agencies that wield most of the money spent on advertising on the Facebook platform and the companies they represent.

It would seem that the more time consumers spend on Facebook (over 53 billion minutes a month, according to Nielsen), the more the advertising economy would benefit, as more advertising inventory — what Facebook sells and media agencies buy — becomes more plentiful.

But alas, something appears to be broken, or breaking.

Be relevant, free and valuable

Be offered in multiple formats

Use stories and sequencing

Be consistent

Guide your visitors to make the best decisions

Build a trusted base of fans

Lead people to personally positive results

When you use these principles in your social media marketing, you’ll draw attention to your content.

And getting attention is the first step to making anything happen.

Are you ready for some … Tweeting? It used to be enough to have a beer in hand and a bowl of chips in reach to watch a football game.  Now it is a juggling act with drink, snacks and a smartphone.

A recent survey on sports and social media showed that 42 percent of NFL fans and more than half of college football fans (51.5 percent) are using Twitter during games. Twitter activity spikes higher after the game — 62.5 percent for the NFL, 53.1 percent for college football — as fans throw their two cents worth into the social media commentary about what they just watched.

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The reason is that you don’t have a personal connection with a search engine…no matter how sophisticated.

This is the reason people’s attention is shifting away from search engines and towards the personalized social networks can be summed up into two words: Referral Traffic.

When 82-year-old Jean Evans needed help with her hot water tank, she asked a neighbor.  When Brandon Rutherford heard Evans’ dilemma he asked his friends on Facebook for help.

“That’s why social media is there. It’s not just to say, ‘Oh look, I can join this group today, yippee.’”  ”It’s where you can actually meet up with somebody and say I need this or that…can you help me?” Rutherford said.

Offers came from all over the state. Some willing to give money, others willing to give their time. ”Phenomenal. It is nice to have people still care and they’re not so greedy,” Evans said.  Four days later Evans has a new hot water tank. It was installed Thursday afternoon free of charge.

When asked about the value of social media Jean Evans talks about how nice it is to know that people still care, that they aren’t all that greedy.  Notice that she doesn’t talk about search engines, or how well Google understood the semantics of her search.  It was the altruism of people.

People belong to online groups because they have something in common with these folk.  They live near each other, work in the same field, have the same hobby interests.  Some of these people don’t even know the others in their group… but they trust them.  Now we begin to introduce social decision making, or social search.

And what is Social Search?

That’s the ultimate advantage of all this effort.  You see, the trend is leaning toward people asking their friends for suggestions.  The influence you will have on your friends decisions is increasing.  It’s so important to position yourself as an expert to your audience.  When your potential clients are ready to make a buying decision, you want them to think of you as the best solution

People want shortcuts, hints, secrets… We always want lots of choices, but with more choices comes more procrastination.  It’s harder to make a decision with too many choices, thus the reason we provide choices yet offer a suggestion.

So giving choices is good, but suggestions are better?

Kind of… because we like choices, we have to provide them… because we become paralyzed to deciding… we need a suggestion.  It’s a delicate strategy of content and persuasion.