Prior to the rise of the internet, most businesses depended on offline marketing tactics. As the web expanded, many businesses ventured online by creating a website to represent their company. These sites were developed to rank high in search engines for specific keywords.
For example, a dentist located in Long Island, NY, would create a site which used the keywords “dentist in Long Island” and try to get other websites to post links back to his site in order to make search engines like Google show the site in the results when web searchers typed in those keywords. This is known as SEO, or “search engine optimization”.
Locating a business website was soon not enough for many online searchers, who wanted to not only find a dentist in Long Island, but to find out what people were saying about the dentist’s practice. Review sites sprang up all over the web, but these were easily manipulated by businesses posting positive reviews for themselves and negative reviews about their competitors.
More and more internet users started turning to social networking sites to get real time, honest information about local businesses from their peers. The social platforms responded by making their sites more user friendly for business usage. The direct access to consumers and easy modes of interaction make social sites a perfect place to attract potential new customers, clients or patients.
As a Social Media Manager you will take the skills and tools that you learn in this course and sell them to businesses both online and offline to help them improve their existing online Social Marketing activities or get them online, and up and running.
You will earn a residual income from each client, as the services you are going to provide them are ongoing. As you grow your business you will outsource some of the tasks to Virtual Assistants (People you use remotely to do the hard work, while you manage the relationship with your client). You will use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn etc. to create a more profitable interaction between your client and his prospects and customers.
Done right this is a win-win. Your work will pay for itself. Your client will recommend you to friends, and business associates. As a Social Media Manager you will be responsible for setting up the profiles for them – for example creating a Twitter account, filling out the profile, building followers, etc.
Additionally you can offer to produce a branded design for their social media profiles, which you can outsource for half the price you will charge. You will learn how to do all of this and more over the coming days and weeks.
You will also maintain their Social Media accounts for them. For clients who already have their profiles setup you will do tasks like deleting Spam messages, or make timely announcements for them. Most Social Marketing tasks are very simple, but to your clients who are very busy running their businesses and don’t want to get involved in the social media marketing, they are very valuable and are something worth paying an expert (You!) to do for them.
