Promote your business using social media
By Kirsti Scott
One of the great things about social media is that people who interact with your company through online social networks have chosen to connect with you. Either they have networked with you on LinkedIn, became a fan of your Facebook business page, followed you on Twitter, or searched for you online. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call these people your “fans.”
In all of these cases, your fans have decided that they want to hear from your company through online networks. But they also have joined with the understanding that social networks provide a forum for conversations, not one-way communication. Your job is to make sure you keep up healthy conversations between your company and your fans.
Post information on a regular basis
Once you have fans for your LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter profiles, everything that you post on your page or profile appears in the stream of information on your fans’ pages. Post regularly to your profiles, including a helpful, informative collection of stories. It doesn’t have to be every day—depending on your industry, once a week could be enough.
Share a variety of posts
The information you share on social networks should help create awareness of your company’s products or services, but you also should include helpful information that isn’t directly self-promotional. You should certainly share information about recent business successes, current products, the latest news about your company, and current promotions. But you also should include information that is helpful or interesting to your customers, but not necessarily directly related to your company. You might share information about your customers’ industry, events related to your products or services, or news about complementary products or services. You can share photos of company staff members, video from events, the slides from a recent presentation, or images of your products in use.
Encourage conversations
Research shows that customers who interact with you online are more likely to purchase from you in the future, so it makes good business sense to encourage your fans to interact with your company. Your fans might like to comment on your posts, share their own photos or stories, and recommend your company to others. You can also encourage participation by creating online polls, requesting feedback on your services, creating a contest, or even asking for product ideas. Register on local search sites and product review sites to create a forum for customer reviews and recommendations. And be available to answer questions asked by your fans. Social networks are a great way to provide instant customer service, getting real-time feedback on your company and creating long-term relationships with your customers.
Lead fans to your regular website
When researching purchases, the majority of Americans use online searches, and most of them visit company websites before making a purchase decision. Having high-quality links to your company’s website improves your ranking in search engines. Creating links from social networks to your website helps lead visitors to pertinent information on your website and helps improve your ranking by providing more links to your site. And when your fans link to your website, their links give your site’s ranking a further boost.
Expand your business
Social networks let you connect with customers, colleagues, and vendors who are anywhere in the world. You can use online networks to reach out to people who you normally wouldn’t get a chance to meet, sharing resources, getting recommendations, and promoting your company in markets or distant locations.
And through the relationships you build online, you can grow a thriving business with a healthy, active online community.
Tags: facebook, linkedin, social media, twitter
August 19th, 2009 at 10:25 am
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August 27th, 2009 at 5:52 am
This is nice idea because every one having good social network.All given information is nice and very helpful to newbie.Thank for this much informative post.
September 9th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Margaret
http://businesseshome.net
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:34 am
Very interesting and lovely blog. Thanks for this post and share.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:31 pm
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October 19th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I’m still a college student, and I only recently got into the whole social networking thing, but your post makes a lot of sense and has good information on how to leverage the social media sites to promote a business. I’ve been considering starting a small business now that I am almost out of school, and I will definitely be looking to use social sites to promote.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Glad the post was helpful. Let me know if you need any help getting started!
November 10th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Hi
I agree with you, that’s a great and easy why to promote web pages in a few seconds. One of my favorit sites for that is this one http://biz-diggers.com/ it’s one of few social bookmarking sites that specialised in business news.
Good luck for you
November 16th, 2009 at 4:47 am
Awesome! We were looking for this anywhere!