In today’s wired world, engaging in social media is a powerful way to help increase your brand awareness and reach potential clients.  Just take a look at the recent results of surveys conducted by Nielsen Online:

• Over 67 percent of online users are engaging in “Member Communities”, which includes social networks and blogs, making it more popular than personal email.
• Twitter continues as the fastest growing social networking site, growing in popularity as not only a means of communication between friends, but as an essential part of brand marketing.
• While topping the charts for the number of unique visitors, Facebook also leads the way for stickiness, with the average user spending 3 hours and 16 minutes on the site. The average Twitter user sticks around for about 12 minutes.

Top 5 Social Networking Sites

It is evident in these results that social networking has become an essential part of today’s online experience.  At WeddingWire, we are committed to educating and connecting you with numerous social networks in order to extend your reach to today’s wired brides.

What is the foundation of social media? A simple question with multiple ways to respond, but I found a great post this morning that discusses the 5 C’s that make up the foundation of social media marketing.

• Conversation: Go where the conversations are taking place - Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, etc.  Establish accounts and create your identity.  Stay up-to-date with your accounts and participate often.  Really get to know your followers and audience so you can actively participate.

• Community: Seize the opportunity to not only join and participate in conversations, but add your own value.  This is how you create a community, which you must work to maintain and earn the trust of your followers. A good site for community building (in addition to the ones mentioned above) is Ning.  Ning allows its users to create their own social websites and social networks. It’s a good place to create a form or community around your product, which in return can produce useful user feedback.

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How do you generate new business? This is very good question to ask yourself.  Through surveys and discussions, we have found that a significant amount of vendors in the industry rely on referrals from their happy customers (”word of mouth”) and networking groups for business growth.  Relying solely on these two ways of generating new business can make it very challenging for vendors to sometimes predict and control business growth.  This is where the internet can play in.

I found a good post that highlights some key things to consider when looking to use the internet to get more referrals.  Here is a quick summary:

• Great product and service = happy customer. Word spreads fast online so having happy and satisfied customers will help your business (subscribing to your blog, connecting with you on LinkedIn, following you on Twitter, etc.). On the other hand, unhappy customers can easily cause harm to your online reputation. So make sure to maintain a high level of your product and service!

• Be committed! Your clients have to be willing to refer you, so you have to be committed to making sure they see success and are please with your product and service. To do this, you have to know your client and develop a level of understanding and trust. Look for ways to always maintain and improve this relationship to make sure expectations are being met.

• Give good reason. Find ways to connect with your clients online by engaging in inbound marketing – create good, educational content on your website (that is easy to understand), blog about yourself and your business, engage in social interaction with your clients (via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.). All of these ways will help you connect with your clients and in return give them a good reason to refer you.

So I turn the question over to you, how do you generate more business?  Share in the comments section!

In order to maximize on what Twitter has to offer, it’s important to build your community. To do this you have to start by figuring out what your objective is. Do you want to keep your followers up-to-date on your business? Do you want to share dialogue with followers, maybe potential clients? Do you want to stay ahead of the social media curve? Whatever your objective is, it is important to determine it first and then dive right in!

I found a great list of 10 tips to guide you in establishing your community. Here is a quick summary:

• DO - create a user-friendly ID. Your Twitter ID is part of your personal brand, so use your name or business name. If neither of these are available, blend them or stay as close to them as you can (ex: MegWW). Also, the shorter the name the better!

• DO - search for people. It’s complete normal and accepted to follow people you don’t know (a huge part of what Twitter is all about). So search for people in the wedding industry or even people from an industry you don’t know much about! Try Twitter Search or Twellow to find people to follow.

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You can now use Twitter People Search to track them down! Twitter is much more useful when you can find the accounts of your friends, colleagues, competitors or companies that interest you.  So whether you are searching for a friend or for WeddingWire, just click the “Find People” in the navigation bar at the top of your Twitter homepage and search away!

Not into Twitter yet?   Sign up for your free account today and let the fun begin!

Follow us on Twitter!

With the current state of our economy, many companies are turning their efforts to Inbound Marketing because it is a more efficient way to market their business than traditional, Outbound Marketing.

Let’s take a look at the difference between the two types:

• Outbound Marketing: Main goal is to find customers.
• Inbound Marketing: Main goal is getting found by customers.

So why are companies now using more Inbound Marketing tactics? Here are a few reasons I found:

• It costs less. Inbound Marketing is all about creating good content and talking about it. This can be done by starting a blog, creating a Facebook fan page, posting videos on YouTube, or using Twitter. All of these examples are free and can draw a significant amount of attention.
• Better targeting. With Inbound Marketing you can be more selective when choosing your audience instead of targeting the masses.
• It’s an investment, not an ongoing expense. If you invest money in creating content that puts you in the high rank of Google’s organic results (which is free), you will be there until someone else displaces you.

With the New Year only weeks away, it might be helpful to take a look at your own marketing plan and see if you can incorporate any of these Inbound Marketing tactics!

For more details on Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing, check out this great blog post from HubSpot.

If you’re like me, you want your blog posts to reach as many people as possible. Feeds and social networks have made it easier, but this morning Chris Brogan highlighted a few easy ways to promote blog posts that reaffirmed most of what I do after each post I write. So I wanted to share to see what you’re doing to get word out that you’ve got a great post to read.

1. Bookmark your best posts on Delicious
2. Use StumbleUpon to bookmark posts as well
3. Use the status message on LinkedIN to link to your blog post
4. An interesting idea is when leaving a comment on an industry related blog, put the blog post link in the URL field instead of your normal blog URL.  However, by no means mention your post.  Simply leave an insightful comment adding to the discussion
5. Share your post on Facebook using BlogCast (could the status message here as well)
6. Make sure your posts get shared FriendFeed automatically
7. Let Zemanta insert related article links at the bottom of your story.  You can get the plug-in for Wordpress, Movable Type, Firefox and others here.
8. Tweet about your post on Twitter.

So what ideas work for you?  Or better yet, didn’t work for you?  I’d love to hear.