As online marketing terms and phrases go, “synergy” is probably one of the most overused. In fact, those of us in the industry hear it so much that sometimes tends to lose its meaning.
Despite that fact, however, it really is the best word to describe what usually happens when social network marketing starts to work. It’s never easy to pinpoint any one tactic or moment; rather, you suddenly find that clusters of new clients and colleagues start coming at you from all angles. What seems to be a useless exercise just a few weeks or months ago suddenly starts yielding monstrous results. You reach a “tipping point” where all of your efforts start to pay off.
How long it takes to reach this point depends largely on you, your business, and what kind of time and effort you put into social network marketing. The easiest way to speed things up, though, is by using all of your tools in concert. In other words, never rely only on Facebook to generate leads, or Twitter to get your message out – instead, be sure that each profile is linked to the others, with a consistent message coming through every blog post, social update, or video you put out into the virtual world.
Additionally, don’t just limit your efforts to what’s online, or even considered “social media.” There’s no reason your print ads can’t mention your Facebook fan page; likewise, Twitter can be a great avenue for broadcasting the sale you’ll be having at your physical retail location in a couple of weeks. Naturally, as we’ve mentioned all along, you’ll want to keep these outright promotions relatively rare when working on social networking sites, but that doesn’t mean you have to abandon them altogether.
Just as you would want the sales and marketing divisions of your company working closely together, so too should your social networking profiles be building on top of each other in your other online and off-line promotional efforts. Take a step back once in a while and check whether all the parts of your marketing advertising are moving in the same direction; synergy might get talked about too much, but that’s only because it’s so beautiful when it happens.