Social Media

Social Media

8 Social Networking Do’s

1.  Do write attention grabbing posts. Attention grabbing posts can be created a number of ways including:

•  Ask Questions – Asking a question helps engage your reader immediately.

• Arouse curiosity – Make them have to click through to find out what you’re talking about.

• Provide value – For example a “How to” statement demonstrates value and benefit.

2. Do Integrate Social Networking Into Your Company Website.

• Add a find me/follow me button. Most website and blogging platforms offer widgets, modules, or plugins that help you promote your social networking profiles

•  Add it to your signature. Do you have an email signature?  Do you send newsletters, autoresponders, and promotions?  Add your social networking link or name to your signature.

3. Do Choose the Right Social Networking Sites

With more than 200 mainstream social networking sites, and that’s not including all the forums, chat rooms and blogs, it can be difficult to decide which site is the right site to invest your time and energy in. Evaluate them based on:

• Popularity – How many active members does the site have?

•  User Statistics – Is your audience participating on this site?

•  Features – Does the site offer business promotion friendly features?

•  Your Profile Options – Are you able to build a profile to build brand awareness and promote your business?

4. Do Create a Social Networking Strategy. Before you begin comparing social networking sites, spend a few hours or days creating a plan. Write down:

•  Who your target audience is

•  What your social networking goals are

• What image you want to convey

•  What options you need to achieve your goals and create your ideal profile

5. Do Test and Track your efforts – Social networking is like any other marketing strategy. It’s important to have a goal, a plan and a system to measure and track. That way you can be sure you’re spending your time and marketing budget wisely.

6. Do Update frequently – Like blogging your social networking results are only as good as your efforts. You can also make use of tools like HootSuite that allow you to schedule your posts on Twitter and let you track several Twitter accounts at once.

7. Do remember to be professional. Talk with your audience as if they were customers because they are potential customers. They’re also potential partners and valuable resources. What impression do you want them to have of you?

8. Do Start small. It’s easy to overextend yourself and join too many social networking sites. Start with one or two, build great profiles and actively engaged followers before you begin marketing and promoting on another site

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Social Media, Website Traffic

How Social Networking Grows Your Business

social networking

There’s no doubt, social networking gives you access to your audience but what else can you accomplish with this tool?

Social gives business owners the ability to:

• Build an online presence
• Increase website traffic
• Boost SEO
• Establish credibility
• Connect with your audience
• Glean valuable information to grow your business

Whether your online business is just starting out, or you’re a large corporation, adding social networking to your marketing strategy will help you promote and grow your business.

Options to Use Social Networking to Promote Your Business

There are a number of ways you can use social networking to promote your business. Let’s take a look at the most popular and powerful.

• Drive Traffic to Your Blog or Website – Post a curiosity generating or attention grabbing headline and include a link to your website.
• Promote – Launching a new product? Announce it via social networking sites. Offering a huge holiday discount? Let people know.
• Share Lessons and Experiences – Social networking is about connecting. If you have something relevant to your industry to share, share it. Start conversations and partake in them.
• Share Pictures, Audio and Video – Many social networking sites embrace visual forms of posting as well. YouTube of course is a video social networking site but even Facebook lets you link to and post audio and video messages. And Twitter developers have created picture and video sharing applications.
• Share Information – Post interesting and relevant statistics, quotes, or headlines and start a conversation. When appropriate, link to your company website.
• Advertise – Many social networking sites also sell advertising space.

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Social Media, Website Traffic

5 Minute Social Media Tactics for Businesses

Building up an online presence is an ongoing process, one that requires consistent maintenance and patience. However, just because it does take some time to achieve your presence doesn’t mean to say that every single tactic and strategy you employ will take up your entire day. In fact, here are a number of social media tactics that take no more than 5 minutes each!

Tweet

Twitter has a 140 character limit, so there’s no space for essays. Of course, condensing your message down into 140 characters might take a few minutes to do, but a regular Tweet relating to your niche area, wider industry or some of your own specific business/website news can keep people informed. Make use of hash tags (for example #blogging) so that people seeking Twitter users who regularly update on a particular topic area can easily locate and follow you. Follow people in your niche and respond to their Tweets. It’s a quick thing to do but is essentially a micro-networking strategy.

Blog Comment

Find websites and blogs in a similar niche to your business. Read and comment on posts. Again, this is quick but is a great means of networking and getting your voice heard within your niche. Becoming familiar with other people operating in a similar area to you could lead to contacts and exposure opportunities.

Update your Profiles

If you don’t already have Facebook/LinkedIn profiles (or other social media website profiles) you should. Spending a few minutes each week making sure it’s up to date is time well spent. Bear in mind that anyone seeking more information about you or your business may well start with a search around Facebook or similar sites.

Check your Online Reputation

Google yourself or your brand name (or both)! Keep an eye on what’s in the top twenty or so results. If anyone mentions you on a forum or a blog and this comes up, get in on the conversation, whether positive or negative. If it’s negative, you can respond and handle the situation. If it’s positive you have the opportunity to thank people for mentioning your name and accomplishments.

Forums

A less spoken form of social media these days, the forum, has been somewhat overshadowed by Facebook and Twitter. But they’re still well used and very convenient discussion platforms from which to voice your opinion on an area you are knowledgeable in. If you come across forums relating to you niche, why not register and start taking part? A comment here or there takes just few minutes but gives you the opportunity to prove yourself an authority on your niche area.

There’s no such thing as overnight results where social media is concerned. It’s a long term process of building up a profile for yourself. But once you have done so, it really is an invaluable asset which will undoubtedly lead to some incredibly useful contacts and potentially to sales too.

This is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh. Stacey is from Manchester, UK and works in Online Marketing at Tecmark: SEO Liverpool and Manchester.

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