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What Social Media Engagement Achieves for Business
In short social media is about engagement through sharing, which for a business means targeting your product line, your articles or your services to engage a potential customer or customer base. Collectively, products, services and articles are known as content, and it is through offering quality content that success can be achieved through your channels. Social marketing has nearly 900 million users globally, and covers every topic category you can think of. Along with adding a potential customer and customer base or readers, social media is also relevant for search engine optimization. Social media is a unique format because it helps promote your content to your audience, and in turn it generates traffic through people sharing your content with others and through SEO. Perhaps more importantly, social media helps a business build trust with its online reviews, and almost every brand you can think of uses social media for this reason. Think of it this way: You come across two companies that provide similar services; One has 250 Facebook likes, the other 43 – which would you choose? So whether you are an online retailer, an affiliate marketer, provide a service like tutoring, or run a news site, social media can help you build your business online. Google estimates that by 2015 UK consumers will have bought £40 billion worth of products and services online.
Popular Social Media Sites and Their Uses
Getting to grips with the nuances of social media’s role in promoting your business can have more than its fair share of associated headaches. Here is a list of the most popular social media sites and their uses:
Facebook is primarily for sharing. It can be products, articles or services. In short, it’s all about sharing your content with as many people as possible.
Twitter is all about sharing news on any topic. Don’t let the word news make you feel that this doesn’t apply to products. New product launch, new stock ready for sale – Twitter is good for it all.
Google+ is partly a combination of the two and has become crucial to search engine optimization if nothing else.
Blogging is a great way to provide news and expertise to your readers, client and customer base, or followers. It provides a good way to attract visitors to your site through search engines.
YouTube is all about showcasing videos to a wide audience. It is being used by businesses all the time to sell products and services. As YouTube is owned by search engines, videos appear prominently on search engine results. You can also use YouTube ads to create a secondary income stream.
Pinter Est and other bookmarking sites are great at showcasing visual products. If your business is selling something online, regardless of a product or service, make sure you are posting on Pinter East and as many bookmarking sites as you can find.
Social Media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Good position on search engines is all about unique quality content that is well shared and well linked from other websites. By sharing your content on social sites, you are more likely to like it on Facebook, retweet with Twitter, or share a pin on Pinter est. Links are important for good SEO and posting your content on social sites provides a link from your social site, and in each case it can be targeted to a specific web page. By web page, I mean a specific solution, service or article. It also ensures the indexing of the web page by Google. Which is to say, it adds it to its database, making sure it can be found on search engines.
Finding the Best Social Media Sites for Your Business
To find the best social site for your business, think about what your business is trying to do. If your business sells products or services, use social sites that feature photos and videos to sell products. YouTube, Pinter est, Delicious and Instagram are all really good for showcasing products. If you’re in the sales game, make videos of your products, take nice professional photos and find them on these sites, and make sure you link the pictures and videos directly to your site content. If you sell on eBay or an affiliate seller, try to link directly to the product page where a potential customer can buy it. Plus, feature products on your Facebook or My Space page, Google+ page, and Twitter. For service providers, a slightly different spin on social media promotion is needed because more often than not, a service provider will sit in between visual social media and text-based social sites. This also applies to affiliate marketers. If you can, represent your services with a picture or icon, and publish the picture or icon on visual sites. Use video to showcase your services – If you can get testimonials from customers, that’s gold dust. Publish regularly on your blog and tweet articles as well as insights into the industry. This engagement will help you build trust with all of your current customers, showcase your skills, and help you be found by people looking to become new customers.
social media advertising
If you have the budget for it, Facebook offers advertising on a click-through basis like Google Ad Sense, or it can be used to earn likes. This often happens in usage examples. For affiliate marketing revenue streams, a click-through will expose the user to your revenue stream, while a like will ensure that they are notified every time an article or new product is published. It’s trial and error and it seems to work well for some businesses, but others have lost faith in it.
saving time
By now, you’ve probably guessed that updating social sites is hard work, especially if you publish a lot of daily content. While larger businesses hire people to be at their helm, some start-up businesses don’t have the budget or time. It is possible to help automatically update your social accounts by using automatic syndication sites.
a social media strategy
Step 1: Create a Facebook Page, Twitter Account and Google+ Page for the business
These are used regardless of the type of business, and all help tremendously with SEO. Make sure you create business pages on Google+ as well as Facebook. It keeps your personal details and actually social media life hidden from your customers or clients, and it provides better option for business promotion.
Step 2: Identify the social media sites that are most important to your business
If your site sells products, list all the online bookmarking and video sites you can find and create accounts. Make sure you use Pinter Est and YouTube. If your business is for services, information, or an affiliate marketing revenue stream, you want to spread the word in as many ways as possible. Use blogging sites like Tumblr, Blogger and WordPress. org to syndicate your sites and services, and try creating news content if you provide services to showcase your expertise in your field.
Step 3: Use social media tools such as ‘if this then that’
‘If This Then That’ or ifttt.com automatically updates your social accounts. It’s easy to set up and works by automatically syndicating information across a host of social sites as each site is updated. This, as you can imagine, saves a lot of time. Be careful, though, and make sure business-appropriate social sites, such as bookmarking sites for online retailers, appear exactly as you want them to be found. Automatic syndication has limitations and often links and images don’t appear the way you want them to. Nonetheless, and especially to syndicate blog posts via RSS feeds, it is a great time saver to promote your business through social media. Not all social media can be syndicated in this way, but sites that do syndicate are worth creating accounts to promote your business. The more social media sites you post on, the better.
Step 4: Use #hashtags
Whenever you post your content, make sure you use proper #hashtags. This will help users find your content when they search for it. So if I’m selling tires on eBay, #tyre, #cartair, #car, #tray is good, and good for sports news, #sports news, #football #cricket etc.
Step 5: Once It Starts
Once your content starts hitting the Web 2.0 world, monitor your accounts for feedback. Focus on sites you’ve identified as important to your business and respond to questions and comments. When giving feedback, try to be helpful and non-abusive, even if the commenter isn’t pleasant. Professionalism goes along.
Step 6: Participation
Twitter and Google+ show trending topics and include popular topics that people are discussing. It’s worth doing a weird Twitter search to see what people are talking about in relation to your business, and contributing to the discussion. It’s a great way to make connections and hopefully have more success.
Step 7: Monitoring Success
Monitoring success has proved difficult for social media. Unlike SEO results, which can be measured on click-throughs and content engagement, it is not so easy on social sites for various reasons. You might feel like if you provide news that 10 comments on a story is a good sign of success, whereas 100 likes of a product video on YouTube with no obvious link to sales is most likely to be immediately seen as positive. is not clear. However, it’s worth remembering that even if people don’t reach your main site directly through social sites, it may encourage them to come back later. Always keep in mind that social media is for sharing content, so any like, comment or retweet is positive.
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