Here are 18 basic social media tips to help your marketing.

Today I was asked by a local businessman for some advice about how to market his cycling company using social media. He asked me to take a look at his website and twitter page to see if there was anything I could recommend – a health check if you will?

Quite a lot of stuff was already in place but there was plenty of room for improvement. Here is a sanitised and generalised list of recommendations I gave him. Most are relevant to everyone so there is probably some stuff here that might be applicable to you.

So here are 18 basic social media tips to help your marketing

1. Make sure you have a website. That’s going to be your front room for your marketing efforts
2. Make sure your website is responsive so it looks fine when viewed on a phone or tablet
3. Make sure your phone number on your contact page is a link so that your visitors who use a mobile can easily ring you. You could also enable them to download your contact card directly into their address book – you need to make it as easy as possible for people to contact you
4. Make sure your website is personable. This is YOUR business so it needs to have YOU in it – make yourself personable. Have your picture on there and write your blog posts using your real name – make sure they’re not from “admin”
5. Create a brand for yourself online. I always suggest using your face! Get a decent picture of your full face and put it on the website. Use the same picture on your twitter page and all your other social media sites. People need to recognise your brand and grow to trust you
6. Make sure your ‘about’ page is nice and personable and the link is prominent not hidden down at the bottom of the page
7. Make your ‘about’ page a story about YOU – include some nice personable back story so your customers can relate to you
8. Include pictures in EVERY blog post – it makes them far more interesting and attractive to your readers
9. You need to have prominent links to your social media sites so your visitors can easily ‘follow you’
10. You also need ‘share this content’ buttons for each of your social media sites on each blog post – see mine for an example http://webandITstudio.com
    
11. Categorise your posts – when they are in groups your customers will be able to find new content easier
12. On your twitter page use your photo for the central image and your company logo as the header picture. Your face will be the image on all your tweets thus reinforcing your brand image
13. Use the same principles for any other social media sites
14. The purpose of your blogging should be to drive traffic to your website. Create your content on the website and use twitter etc to link people back to your site
15. Do some research into basic SEO and try to follow the principles relating to article titles, headings, image alt text, etc. when you write a blog post you need people to find it in searches and come to your website. Then tweet a link to your blogpost
16. Find other blogs similar to your area of interest and comment on their blog posts and try to link back to your own site. You need to create links back to your site
17. Create blog entries on your website at least twice a week but tweet at the very least daily – 2 or 3 is better – that includes retweeting other peoples’ tweets about subjects that interest you
18. If I were you I would be creating a buzz on your site about the Tour De France. It’s the biggest thing in the cycling world to hit Yorkshire – ever – and you’re smack in the middle of it. Millions will be searching for articles about it and you need to to get some of that traffic through your site!

With regard to number 18 he is very lucky to have such a huge topic to build upon. Try to think of something that is relevant to you and work on that.

Is there anything in this list that you need to tweak on your site?