For far too long, marketers have been preaching the slow and steady strategy for social media marketing. While this isn’t a bad idea, it’s not necessarily a good idea either. Here’s why: most small businesses cannot afford to play the long game. They often have limited budgets, which means that they want results as quickly as possible.

As far as we’re concerned, it shouldn’t take you a lot of time to create a rabid fan base with lots of engagement and significant returns on investment. So, if you’re a small business owner looking to increase your social media reach quickly and effectively, this article will help you do just that.

Buys Fans, Followers, and Friends

There are many social networking websites. But for the best results in marketing and business, none quite beats Facebook and Twitter. So, start with those first. You can then look for and explore others after mastering these two. As far as we’re concerned, however, these two alone will keep you busy.

That said, start by buying followers on Twitter and Facebook. It’s simple:

  • Set up your twitter and Facebook account
  • Create Facebook Fan or Business Pages
  • Start advertising those pages on Facebook and Twitter –you can either pay for them for the advertising or go the free route.
  • Make sure that you have a lot of content on the Fan Pages, then tweet the links

Pay Influencers to Increase Reach

Find huge online influencers in your market, pay them to spread the word about your business, product or service, and then give them the link to your Facebook Fan page. You can use social influencer marketer platforms like Neoreach to find affordable social media influencers who will willingly tell their audience about you and drive a ton of traffic to your pages.

Use Youtube to Your Advantage

Start uploading videos to Youtube. You know the amazing thing about smartphones? You can use them shoot 3-5-minute videos, upload them to your Youtube account and share them on your Facebook business page… all these while you’re on the go. Listen, don’t overcomplicate this.

The video could be a tutorial, a video of the typical day around the office, a video of your showing your audience how to make or do something, a video of a completed project… whatever you feel like, just point, shoot and upload. This is how you create rabid engagement.

If you want to go the extra mile for subscribers, simply pay for Youtube’s display video ads and you’ll have even more exposure.

Create More Engagement

Getting the audience is the first step to succeeding with your social media marketing campaign. Next is keeping your audience engaged.

How do you do this? Simple: Create awesome, engaging content. It could be in the form of pictures, videos, insightful articles, sharing really useful resources… whatever you feel will be relevant to your audience.

Want to know a trick to making sure you never go off-topic? Create a poll and ask them what they’d like to know or see more of. You could also create a list of questions for the week. Better still, you could create a weekend Q&A session where you’ll answer all their questions.

Host contests, clearance sales, offer bonuses discounts and rebates specifically for your social media audience.

Use Social Media Tools

Listen, social media marketing can often feel like a day job –it’s why most small business owners avoid it. So, make it easier by using social media tools to monitor your engagement across multiple social networks, syndicate your content across multiple networks and track audience engagement.

Social media marketing doesn’t have to difficult or have long waiting periods. If you follow the tips outlined in this article, you will start seeing great results in 4-12 weeks guaranteed.

Oscar King is a businessman and freelance writer who contributes articles and insights into social media marketing. If you would like to learn more about Oscar, you can check out his Google+  profile.