Confused by social media? Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and the rest? Social media is an exciting way to build relationships and reach out to the wider world, especially when used as a device for business marketing and public relations. These new websites provide a way to effectively engage with your market. But for more effective use, it should be optimized by setting it up in a commercial way.
Using these websites for business is all about increasing website traffic, increasing sales, increasing page views, increasing brand awareness, creating a need for the brand, and reaching more potential customers. These points can help you succeed:
- Social media is about other people, not you. Try to help other people through your chosen channels. It’s not just about you, it’s about helping them. Therefore, posts on topics that everyone can relate to are a useful way to start a conversation. Don’t spread a message, discuss a topic.
- Plan a strategy. Plan how you are going to promote your business, don’t just post random posts. Failing to plan could be planning to fail.
- quality publications. Create quality posts that people want to read. More people read content than create quality content.
- Connect with Users and Clients. People like to review and promote brands and ideas online. Make use of people who could help you.
- Create a Blog. Blogs are tracked by social networking sites like Technorati, which currently tracks more than 110 million blogs. Get your business blog tracked and promoted.
- Claim your blog on Technorati. Claim your social media blog to get it indexed.
- Link to other websites and blogs. Search engines and Internet users depend on links from one site to another.
- use video. But remember that your video needs to connect with others, a video broadcast about a business or service will not connect with a large number of people. Promote a video through YouTube. A funny, bizarre, and perhaps controversial video could be widely distributed.
- Find relevant Micro Communities. Microcommunities are social communities related to education, the public sector, gardening, houses, etc. These are usually groups within a large website or forums. Although there are specialized micro sites online.
- Monitor your social networking sites. Try Yahoo Pipes to monitor your social channels or other sites to make it easier to manage various social networking sites like socialmedia.com or hootesuite.com.
The most used sites at the moment are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Flickr, Reddit and Technorati among many others. Sign up to 1 or 2 of these sites to get started, check how you’re doing before branching out to too many sites at once.
