by: Jessica Davis

If you spend any time on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll see plenty of ads and tweets from “social media marketing experts” who can setup and run your social media marketing campaigns for a fee. In fact, there are just about as many social media marketing experts as there are online marketing experts.

So, do you really need a social media marketing expert? In today’s economy, most companies can’t afford to throw money away on things they could actually do themselves.

While it’s true that most of the duties of a social media marketing expert are easy enough to do yourself, the real question is do you want to? It boils down to, “how much time can you afford to devote to this type of marketing?” Social media marketing is fairly simple, but can be very time consuming.

Research Social Media Sites

Not all social media websites contain the target market you may be seeking. For example, if your customer demographic is adults between the ages of 50 and 70, MySpace would not be the proper social media website for you. According to Quantcast.com only 9% of MySpace’s members are over the age of 50. If you’re interested in doing more market research on the demographics of social media websites, visit www.quantcast.com.

Sign-Up for Social Media Sites

Usually the sign-up process for social media websites is quick, easy and painless. Take Twitter for example, the sign up process is only one page and takes less than 3 minutes to complete.

Create a Profile

Creating a social media profile can be very time consuming if you are a company using your profile to get new customers. You want to be sure that you provide all of your information, including location, links to other social media profiles, company background, product information and of course a link to your website. Remember, the main purpose of your social media profile is to drive traffic back to your website!

Interact with Potential Customers

This is probably the part of social media marketing that requires the most amount of time invested. You have to interact with other people on the social media sites in order to get them to “befriend you”, “become a fan” or “follow you”. Interaction can be anything from starting a conversation, answering a question, replying to a comment or posting a resource. I cannot stress this enough, you must interact with people and your interactions must be genuine. Whatever you do, do NOT spam. This form of interaction is annoying and can cause many issues for you down the line including casting a dark light on your overall brand.

Social media is fun and definitely not something that you will need to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to do. With a bit of research and time, you can have a successful social media marketing strategy without breaking the bank and wasting a lot of hard earned cash on an “expert”.