Have you been conducting both search engine optimization and social media marketing for your business website for quite some time? Well, hopefully, you have ensured that your actions for both those marketing processes complement one another. When combined, SEO and SMM can form an immensely powerful combination, while both are about half as effective when carried out separately.

However, before you can combine SEO with SMM, you need to locate the common tools that benefit both the techniques. You may already be using the most important tool of that kind though. Guess what – it’s your company blog!

The most significant benefit of having a blog is the versatility it brings to promotional campaigns that you carry out. Whether you need to get more followers in social media channels, or want to milk search engines for more traffic, nothing beats having a regularly updated blog. All you need to do is to make sure that the blog is well-written, and that the topics of the posts are related to your business. Also, try to have a little humor mixed with dry facts in the blog posts. It should make the text a little more palatable to visitors.

Always post links to new blog posts on social media channels. That way, you will not only get good traffic to your blog, but your social media channels are also likely to gain new followers.

So, don’t wait any longer. Start combining these two marketing tools today, and extract maximum traffic for your business website, in a hassle free manner.

Companies that have recently launched their social media marketing campaigns often find that they are unable to convert visitors to their social media channels. Are you the owner of one such company? Are you noticing  hundreds of “likes” on your company’s Facebook page and thousands of followers on Twitter channel, but very few (if any) conversions? Well, then you might not be “engaging” your followers in the proper manner. Yes, that’s right! Having thousands of followers without interacting properly with them is not much different from having no followers at all. Let’s see how this situation can be avoided on various networks, shall we?

1. Face it… you’re on Facebook: And that means you need to engage people who “like” your FB page. Find out their IDs, and befriend them if possible. Periodically, ask them for feedback on products (or services) that you have recently launched. Ask them to suggest ways for improving those products (or services). Engaging followers in this manner helps establish the general perception that the company actually pays attention to what their consumers think about their products and services. What better way is there to impress prospective consumers?

2. Twitter is for tweeting, right?: Yes, and it is for engaging people as well! The next time you see someone retweeting one of your tweets about a product, how about sending him (or her) a direct message thanking the follower for the RT, and also asking about his (or her) opinion about the product? That could be a sure shot way of making more people interested in your company, and consequently, your products.

3. LinkedIn… It’s all about answering: No, it is not you, who will do the answering. Rather, you will ask your customers to express their opinions regarding your products and services. This can be especially useful if you are in B2B type of businesses, where a number of your biggest customers are likely to have active presence on this social media network already. Simply engage them via LinkedIn Answers, and as they answer your queries about the products and services that you have launched, the visibility of your posts will keep on increasing, attracting other members towards your posts as well.

Social media networks are not just tools for you to beat the drum about your brand. These are the best tools that can help you build credibility for your brand as well. The power is in your hands, to harness the proper potential of these networks. Use it well, and your sales are guaranteed to hit the roof shortly. And that’s no joke!

Reaching out to prospective customers via social media networks like Facebook and Twitter is certainly one of the best ways to increase the size of your consumer base. However, be sure to approach them on their favorite networks as much as possible. The best way to do this is to ask a third party service provider to get it done for you. Ask them to build a list of contact details of targeted groups of individuals, with their preferred social media networks listed in the records.

This way, you should be able to craft your promotional updates to suit the preferences of different users. For instance, users preferring Twitter are usually known to prefer short ads that state the intended message in as few words as possible. Give them a hint of what you can offer in as few words as possible (less than 100 characters for the message aside from the link is a great combination), in order to have a higher chance of attracting their attention.

Facebook users prefer slightly longer messages, and usually won’t mind having a picture in the update too, but try not to get carried away. Keeping the content within 50-60 words is still a good idea. Ideally, you should give them an idea about the products or services you offer, and then include a link to the page where the details are given.

Brevity is always appreciated on social media networks, as long as you can express the information properly. Make short, easy-to-read promotional messages on social media networks, and you can be rest assured of getting more responses from your target audiences than ever before.

Did you know that the number of social media users in India has been increasing at the rate of 100% with each passing year, for about three years now? At this rate, 45 million Indians will be on social media by the first quarter of 2012! And not just that – 67% Indians with access to the Internet now go through online reviews of a product before buying the same!

As time progresses, this combination could sure make India a haven for retailers from across the globe. As long as retailers focus their marketing efforts on some specific social media networks, they are guaranteed to get plenty of attention from customer bases across the country. These include:

1. Facebook: With more than 37 million users accessing the network every day, India has the third highest concentration of Facebook users among all countries that allow citizens to access it. This kind of penetration among the general population, coupled with the fact that Facebook allows retailers to  build pages for business purposes, makes targeting the network for product promotions quite a lucrative proposition for most companies.

2. Twitter: India is at 10th position in the world at the moment, in terms of number of users accessing Twitter on a regular basis. Since tweets can be received by users even on simple SMS enabled mobile phones, this makes it particularly useful to India-based retailers. By using Twitter, even the most frugal entrepreneur can exploit the popularity of the network, and reach out to more prospective customers than before, while spending very little.

3. LinkedIn: Simply reaching out to consumers may not be enough at all times, given that some entrepreneurs run B2B companies, which service other businesses, or different business fields. LinkedIn makes it easy for these entrepreneurs to get in touch with potential clients. After all, the 9.03 million users of the network across the country do include entrepreneurs, and lots of them, too!

Social media networks are growing by leaps and bounds in India, and in the coming years, the trend is definitely going to continue. Add to that the fact, more and more wallet-conscious shoppers are making it a point to check product reviews before investing in those, and there isn’t any doubt left that social media networks are soon going to control the way retailers promote their businesses. If you are an entrepreneur and have not yet started exploiting the tremendous potential of these promotional tools then, to put it lightly, you are definitely missing something!