How to Master Social Media Marketing

When I talk with “normal” businesspeople (you know, the kind who have actual physical addresses, not just IP ones), they always ask me the same thing.

“I can see the appeal of that Twitter stuff for my teenage daughter — but how is it supposed to help my business?”

Of course, you know the answer to this question.

You’re a social media power user. Maybe even a ninja. You’re using social media to:

• Find new prospects
• Turn them on to your great content
• Entice them into subscribing to your blog or email list
• Convert them into paying customers, then . . .
• Continue to nurture your customer relationships, creating the raving fans that will make all your business dreams come true.

Easy, right?

But if you could still stand to learn a few things on those topics, you may want to take a look at the Social Media Success Summit.

What’s the Social Media Success Summit?

The Summit is a virtual conference designed to cut through the clutter around social media marketing. It gives entrepreneurs the key strategies and next steps to use social media effectively.

Not to make friends. Not to “join the conversation.” But to grow their businesses.

The conference consists of live sessions (running between May 4 and May 25), which include time for live questions and answers. Those are wrapped up with full transcripts, recordings, and often additional material so you can keep mining the conference for business ideas for months to come. (The Summit actually makes everything available for you to listen to and download for a full year.)

The Summit’s 24 speakers this year include Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, Muhammad Saleem, Steve Rubel, Jason Falls, Mari Smith, Chris Garrett, Ann Handley, and many more.

Just a few of their sessions include:

• Specifically how and what to measure with social media ROI
• The three most critical upcoming social media trends
• How to use social news sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to get traffic and killer SEO
• How to bring raving customers repeatedly to a local business (your own or your clients’)
• How to create buzz with social media contests
• How to create a YouTube marketing strategy
• How to bring mobile marketing into your mix
• What you do after you’ve created that Facebook fan page

There’s also a Twitter power panel featuring some bright guys you may never have heard of — Brian Clark, Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, and BlogWorld founder Rick Calvert.

Darren and Brian are also cooking up a bonus panel on where social media is going — what’s going to be hot (and what’s not). And Brian’s doing a third panel on how we at Copyblogger use social media to build our growing unstoppable empire array of businesses.

The event’s close to being sold out

If you’re running any kind of online business (or if you’re serious about starting one), the Summit should easily be worth your time and investment. As of Tuesday, April 20, they’d sold 2200 of their 2500 seats, so if you want in, now’s the time.

Click here to get all the details and register for the conference. And since Brian is involved as a presenter, we’re also a marketing partner for the Summit. As you know if you’ve been hanging out here regularly, we don’t promote anything we don’t think is first rate. Last year’s Social Media Success Summit was exceptionally valuable, and we’re confident this year will be even better.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication. She also co-founded Inside the Third Tribe.