You can reach a much broader audience through social media than through more traditional means of advertising. The use of these networks ensures that your company can control what information is reaching the consumers, and allows you to maintain easy communication with customers. Social media also allows for marketing promotions to be easily distributed.
Facebook’s Places utility allows people to easily check-in when they are at various places using their cell phones. Make a Facebook page for your business, and give customers a big discount if they are able to present to a cashier an updated status message that mentions your business. Foursquare has this feature built in, so see if it will work for you.
You can have posts to your blog show up on LinkedIn by using the application for blog feed. When you post your blog article, it appears automatically as a LinkedIn update. This will allow you to save time and get you tons of exposure by tapping into your LinkedIn acquaintances and the blogging community.
Follow others on Twitter to increase your network and connections. This is just common courtesy. It is a respectful gesture that tells your followers that you don’t think lowly of them. You will keep your followers if you send new followers a tweet to let them know you appreciate them.
To make a more friendly site that works with social media, try adding comments, ratings, and a way to sort material. By adding these things, your readers will be able to mark their favorite articles or pictures. You should keep track of what kind of content is popular.
It’s important to respond to customer comments, complaints and reviews on social media sites as soon as possible. Keep your responses brief, professional and helpful, but respond as soon as you can so you’ll get a good reputation. This very thing can distinguish whether or not your social media marketing is successful. Respond to negative comments even if you don’t have time to respond to anything else. If you ignore negative comments, it can hurt your business’ reputation. Nevertheless, responding to them in a quick and appropriate manner can have a good effect.
Take the time to post new updates every day. Search engines as well as visitors will think your stream is outdated if it is not updated regularly. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so be sure that your visitors see fresh content when they arrive at your social media profile for the first time.
It takes time and patience to put together a social media marketing strategy. You might not get a lot of visitors at first. Some people have gained 10,000 followers within 24 hours, but it’s quite uncommon. Profiles seldom go viral instantly. You have to be patient; you will gain more followers over time.
Listen to consumers, their voices are valuable. Thank everyone who gives you feedback, and make sure you listen to everything they have to say. Take some notes on any feedback and you may notice comments you are getting.
Answer as many questions people throw your way as possible. Check your profile a couple of times each day so that you do not miss anything.
Offer exclusive specials to the people that follow you via social media. You should offer them something they are not able to obtain elsewhere. You can put up a contest for social media friends. If this is not an idea that would work for you, give them exclusive offers and coupons that are only available to fans and followers. This is also a great place for you to post important announcements.
Conversation is an important idea to remember. What many companies fail to recognize, is that feedback, even negative, is giving them the opening to have a conversation. Engage fully with the customers that contact you and build a mutually-rewarding dialogue with them. The more you are willing to learn from your customers, the more likely they are to reward your efforts with continued loyalty and repeat sales.
You can learn quite a bit from the denizens of the social networking sites on which you have a presence. Do not view social media users as money-making tools, but rather as valuable sources of information. If you take the time to collect information on their various interests, you can connect with them more easily, which will help you make money in the future.
Understand that social networks aren’t just another billboard where you passively post content for visitors to look at. Information flows both ways on social networks; you can find out a great deal about the people you’re trying to do business with. This also allows you to develop brand interaction. Obviously this is a form of advertising for your products, but can also double as an informational resource for prospective clients.
Social networking sites can be a great place to advertise your special offers. People will look you up on Facebook if you post interesting content and give Facebook-exclusive discounts from time to time. Your goal in social media marketing is to give your customers a venue for getting to know your business better and feeling more personally involved with your brand.
Make sure that you incorporate YouTube into your plan for success. Once the YouTube account is operational and you post some videos, you need to automatically post to all of your social media sites at the same time. This can simply be done by going to account settings and picking the services you want automatically included in your posts.
Post on Facebook regularly. Keep up with any questions or comments. Quickly and accurately address what people are posting on your Facebook timeline. This will make your customers feel cared for.
Use automation with Twitter if you want to keep people interested in your page. Automation can easily be set up to include auto-tweets from blog posts of other people. Identify quality blogs that can be shared with the audience you have built. That way, your pages will stay current and your audience will always have quality content to read.
There are many positive advantages to a presence for your business on popular social media websites, including the all important concept of brand recognition. Social media makes customers easier to reach.
