How 99% of Network Marketers Are Using Social Media

Network Marketers have understood early on the viral power of Social Media and the potential it carries in driving traffic to their online sales letters.

The one thing though, that an overwhelming 99% of online marketers didn't understand is that Social Media is not a free advertising billboard where they could constantly pitch their business opportunity and products.

This approach is very unproductive and could even damage reputations.

Social Media is about building relationships, allowing other people to know you and your products, building your brand and making available quality content that you publish on the internet. Of course, having a valuable contribution for the community will eventually get you the traffic and exposure your business needs in order to grow. Leads and sells can't be generated unless online marketers acknowledge that first they must provide value to their market.

Social media can be defined as a syndication and communication channel. Couple of remarks are needed here.

First, Syndication is the process of you creating some kind of content - text, video, audio - and then distributing it across different points on the internet. A restrained example is posting an article on your blog and automatically having it shown as an excerpt on Twitter's timeline and your Facebook account.

This process can become extremely complex once you employ a whole range of social media platforms, also know as syndication points, in your traffic generation strategy.

The end result will be that you benefit from this multiplied effect of value every time your content is automatically redirected through different channels in different syndication points. Compare it to multiplying instead of adding.

Whether is SEO or Social Media, your focus should be on creating good quality content. Good content attracts people linking to it and all the benefits that come from that - traffic to your pages, increasing your SEO rankings which, again, translates into more exposure and traffic.

Second, Being a Communication Channel doesn't mean you have the opportunity to communicate your business and products to you audience. They are your friends or contacts (terminology varies) because they are interested in your person and not your products.

This may not be true with the majority of network marketeres, but then again, this article is about what should be done. To resume, it's like inviting someone in your home and start to explain all the benefits of such and such product or bizzopp.

Instead, communicate free information and breaking news about something of general interest for your niche market.

In Social Media, sales are made by offering ten times more content for free.

Just because you've made available three or four free quality releases it doesn't mean you'll make a sale.

It's just as hard responding to one's needs as is responding to thousands. The only real currency in  Social Media Marketing is your time.