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When you rely on tools like Twitter to support your marketing efforts, you’re assuming a certain amount of risk: you can’t control the stability of the platform. As we’ve seen with Twitter’s recent capacity problems, you can lose access to 125 million people because the platform is rendered unavailable. The alternative, of course, would be to sacrifice access to that profound amount of users — with the ante for Facebook up around 500 million.

You can’t stay away, but you can’t simply accept that availability risk will be a part of your future. Fortunately, there’s some space in the middle. Check out our recent guest post on SocialTimes to learn four ways you can hedge against Twitter platform instability.

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Twitter recently announced that it’s not letting users push their own advertisements and sponsored tweets through Twitter. While this is a rather specific act on Twitter’s part, it’s clear how any marketer may seem concerned. Could advertising be at the top of a slippery slope? If you’re worried … don’t. If anything, the Twitter prohibition on tweeted ads (except its own, of course), will help B2B marketers and others who use insights, expertise and experience as the meat in their communications with the market.

Twitter’s Big Change
For Twitter, marketing and advertising have evolved since its inception. What began with self-promotion turned into business promotion, ongoing marketing and then eh ale of space in your own tweet stream (i.e., advertising). For much of its existence, of course, Twitter had virtually no revenue and didn’t seem to have any prospects (or even interest) in changing that.

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The growth in users sustained by major social media platforms means that some of the marketing tactics that have been pushed over the past few years are becoming less effective. Especially if you’re operating in a large market (such as virtualization or IP networking), the development of targeted audiences and communities may become quite difficult. Instead of trying to personalize the social media experience, therefore, it may make sense to do something that sounds strange — treat social media platforms like the internet as a whole.

The tactics that you used on the pre-social media web, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and direct marketing against large lists, are more useful now than ever before ii particularly if you use them within a social media platform. Check out enter:marketing’s recent guest post on SocialTimes, one of the top social media blogs, to learn more about how you can use the marketing tactics you know well in the social media space.

[Source: SocialTimes]

Does having a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group and a blog mean you have to content — regularly — for three different platforms? It’s a scary thought, probably enough to turn even the most zealous social media advocate away from the space. Well, here’s the good news: write content correctly, and you can carve it up for use across your entire integrated social media environment. There is no bad news.

Start with the blog post — it’s going to be your anchor. The material you publish on your blog will tend to be longer and more complex than what you put on Facebook, LinkedIn or certainly Twitter. Everything else you write and post should be pulled from this source. Not only do you only write once, with the exception of small modifications, but you ensure consistency across your entire social media environment.

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Facebook has attained incredible reach, and Twitter’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric. LinkedIn has demonstrated strong and steady growth. But, the history of the social media space is littered with the corpses of former flavors of the month, and the likes of MySpace and Friendster represent sunk costs for companies that believed these environments were around for the long haul. Choosing right platform, it would seem, is crucial.

To think that, however, would be to miss the point entirely.

Instead of working diligently to select the most appropriate social media platform, it’s better to realize that you’ll assume a certain amount of obsolescence risk with any platform you choose. Under these conditions, protecting your social media marketing investment is actually much easier than you’d expect. All you need to do is ensure that your content is easily portable.

Specific social media tools may come in and out of fashion, but well-planned content will stick around for a while.

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We routinely field questions from our clients about social media. They ask if Facebook is better than LinkedIn, how to promote their services effectively on Twitter and what type of information should be used for a corporate blog. These are all important questions to ask before jumping into social media marketing — and they all share a specific problem: they revolve around platform. To use social media effectively, you need to think past platform and focus strictly on content.

The social media platform you use is really nothing more than a mechanism for pushing content and managing your community. You can keep track of friends, fans and followers and receive some great features for pushing information, receiving feedback and tracking interactions. On its own, however, platform provides no real advantage. Everyone has access to the major social media platforms, and the major decision involves whether or not to create an account and get started.

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There’s always a stiff debate around the role of marketers in such environments as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Purists believe that the use of these platforms for product or service marketing disrupts what would otherwise be an online place where friends can get together. Yet, in order to support the operation and growth of social media platforms, there’s an important role for marketers to play. Read our guest post on SocialTimes to learn more.

[Source: SocialTimes]