6 Essentials to Promoting Your Business In Social Media

Entire libraries are filled with books on all sorts of advertising and marketing strategies, and social media is no different. This may appear daunting at first, but if you just keep the following six things in mind you can easily lay the basis for a successful social media campaign promoting your business.

1) Target Your Audience

While we said earlier that technically you can target a world-wide audience of almost any demographic, before embarking on your social media campaign you should determine what your primary customer base will be.

This includes answering the most important question in business: ‘Who am I selling my product to?’. So, who is most likely to buy what you’re company sells. In social media we build networks, and those networks will be populated by those who have an interest in either what you are selling or something similar. For example, you want to promote your plumbing business, well you’re not going to target teens are you? You will build a social media campaign to target home owners, business owners, and land lords.

2) Perfect Your Media Outlet

One of the biggest mistakes which business owners make is to sign up for far too many social media sites. If you are a small business you need to spend time building interactions with your customers through care and attention. This can only be applied by focusing on around 3 or 4 social media sites at one time.

It is recommended that any business owner have a Facebook business page, a Twitter account, and then a social blog such as Tumblr, Blogger, or WordPress. Build up a fan-base through using these sites and then when your online customer base is healthy, expand out slowly to other social media sites. If you start with too many at once often none of them will grow adequately.

3) Engage With Your Audience

In this day and age, everyone is constantly online via mobile devices wherever they are. For that reason social media has become about more than just clicking a like button on a page, users want interaction, they want to feel as though they are part of something and that they matter in the eyes of a business which they use.

Therefore you need to engage with your audience. Make sure that you post regularly to your accounts asking followers questions, and always – ALWAYS – respond to every comment. Even if it is just to say ‘thank you for the comment’.

4) Assign a Social Media Manager

This can make your life MUCH easier. If you have the money, hire someone to administrate your social media accounts.

This frees up time for you to take care of other more pressing matters, but also, if you can hire someone well versed in social media then they will be able to form the most effective media strategy for your business.

5) Network with Similar Businesses

This might seem counter-intuitive, and it is, but the truth is that it works. Let’s say that your Facebook page as 1000 likes on it with an active user-base of around 300, but another business which is loosely connected to what you sell has a page with ten times that number of followers.

Send a friendly PM or email message to the page administrator and ask if you could promote their business in return for them doing the same. This way you get access to their customer base! Always be friendly and always network. This cannot be stressed enough.

6) Post Non-related Material:

With the sheer number of social media pages out there, browsers, fans, users, they all have millions of sites clambering for their attention.

For this reason as well as networking and gaining new customers, you have to make sure your page is fun.

Somewhere people will check back on to re-engage with you. Then when they do require your product, your business will be at the forefront of their mind because they are interacting with you often. Post funny questions, re-tweet and share entertaining posts from other Facebook and Twitter users, talk about favourite sports, television shows, movies etc. Get people talking on your page and make it a lively and enjoyable place for them to visit.

These are just some suggestions, but if you embrace social media and follow these tips, you will exponentially increase your chances for business growth.