Business owners across the globe are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of social media marketing to their sales and profits. If you are not one of them and until now you had believed social media was only for teens and geeks then this article will enlighten you on how you can use it to promote your business.
Looking at the vast number of social media sites on the internet you’d be forgiven for feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all. In truth, there is no need to use all of them, but there are a few that your business should certainly have a presence on. The main ones are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and if all you ever did was focus on these four, your business would have very positive results.
These four sites all work very differently in terms of what content is used, how it is posted, how users interact and how they increase the profile of your business. Regardless of their differences, one important thing you want to have in place is for your business’s profile on each of these sites to link out to the others.
By interlinking your profiles in this way each of them will benefit from the power of the site they are linking from and help to improve the profile’s ranking on the search engines. Also ensure that whenever you have a blog post published or are making comments on other sites, you add the link from these to one or all your social media profiles.
The other advantage of interlinking all your profiles is that some potential customers will not necessarily have profiles on all social media sites. By ensuring you have links to all your main ones it will hopefully include the social media site or sites they use most often.
Another way you can increase the number of links to your profiles is by collaborating with other businesses and sharing links. You might not want to do this with your direct competitors but those within your industry or trusted businesses in another niche are ideal.
The way this works is you agree to make posts on your social media profiles which have a link out to the profiles of your partner business. In return, they do the same for you, so that their followers see and hear about your business when otherwise they might never have heard of you.
A big mistake that many companies make with social media is they turn it into a pitch-fest with every post or video nothing more than sales messages. This is the quickest way to lose followers and any short-term gain is quickly lost in the long run.
Posts should vary as much as possible using a combination of company news, useful information, helpful advice and even the occasional funny gif or video will keep you followers loyal and looking forward to the next post.
You can include an occasional sales message, but keep them well spaced apart and if possible make them subtle rather than screaming out ‘FOR SALE’.
Social media marketing will not bring overnight riches or hordes of customers but done correctly, over time it will grow your customer base which can only lead to more sales and profits.