This is a guest post by Tim at HostPapa.

Social media gives businesses large and small an unprecedented opportunity to build community around their business. Learn to leverage these tools to maximum effect with these 7 advanced social media marketing strategies. Advanced strategies go a step (or several) beyond simply showing up in the social media sphere to introduce and then reinforce marketing messages that prompt users to take desired actions.

Photo Credit: Laurel Papworth and Gary Hayes on Flickr

#1 Defining Your SMM Philosophy

It’s incredible how many SMM managers will leap to advanced strategies before tackling the basics, which is why we’ve placed one of the fundamental and most overlooked basics of SMM first in this list of advanced SMM strategies.

Just as your business operates around a focused, defined mission, so too must your social media marketing revolve around a centralized SMM philosophy. To define this philosophy, take a look first at your market, your audience. Most often, this audience will actually be comprised of many smaller, sometimes overlapping market niches, or segments. Identify these segments and divide your audience accordingly, so that you may tailor your messages to each of these segments individually.

Next place yourself in empathy with each of these market segments, identifying each of their needs, desires, fears, hopes, dreams, etc. And ask yourself how you can add insight and promote action toward fulfilling their desires, abating their fears, and above all prompting action. Finally, make sure that your SMM philosophy authentically represents you and promotes honesty and transparency in all your SMM messages.

This is a guest post by Brandon Williams.

Photo Credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid on Flickr

Twitter is an amazing tool for promotion and marketing for every aspect whether it is for business purposes or for blogging. Another successful method is using a “call to action” in order to get people to check out what it is you have to offer. So, how do you take two successful tools in marketing and add them together to form a tweet that successfully puts out a call to action to users on the social media network?

Well, here is where you, as a business executive or blogger, get to be creative in deciding which technique you’d like to go with when tweeting a call to action.

There’s plenty of potential for you to get people to follow your call to action instructions with techniques that make it more likely for users to do what you need them to do. Start off by figuring out what it is you want to accomplish with your call to action. Do you want users to retweet your blog, or maybe even go to the blog and interact? Or as a business owner, do you want users to make a purchase on your website?

Now that you know what you want to accomplish with your tweet, here is a guide on some techniques you can use in order to reach your goal for your call to action.