Are Social Networking Sites Killing Your Business?
By Roy J Derrick
Whilst social networking sites offer businesses a powerful way to advertise for free, do businesses really benefit from using them?
If used correctly social media sites can be a very powerful way of promoting your company. However, if you don't get it right, using social media sites can be hugely damaging to your company and brand and can ultimately kill off your business.
Below are some tips on how to get the best results from social networking sites and help your business to thrive.
1. Engage With Your Followers
One of the biggest mistakes that many business owners make is to appear too desperate by continually plugging their products or services. There is a fine line between marketing and being too pushy.
Social media sites are all about engaging with your followers and building up trust with them. The best way to achieve this is by providing good quality and varied content. You will also need to ensure that you do not constantly refer to yourself or your business.
For example if you send three tweets or messages a day then your content should be as follows:
One with a call to action, make the second a funny one e.g. using a picture or video that can be industry linked and the third one could share someone else's content ensuring that you copy their link and put it on the post. This will help to portray you as being cutting edge and knowing what the latest trends are.
The more original and varied content that you provide,the more your followers will engage with you,especially if you make sure that you also comment on other peoples posts.
2. Get People To Like You
To be successful within network marketing it is important to get people to "like "you on the social networking sites. "Likes" are very powerful and can be more effective for marketing your business than having a list.
Even simple measures like referring to your social fan page links and logo within your letters, e mails, promotions and even via sms can help you to achieve this. You could even offer a discount or voucher to customers in return for them "liking" you. This can prove very powerful in marketing your business.
3. Promote Yourself /Business Well
Within all the social networking sites there are sections whereby you can provide text about yourself and your business. It is important to ensure that you use good keywords within these sections as search engines actually rank sections such as "about you" on face book. As there are only 20 characters that actively show in the "about you" section on facebook, it is important to provide details of your URL within those 20 characters in order that your followers are immediately aware of your website and what you do.
You will also benefit from indexing your images with critical keywords for your business.
4. Keep All Your URL's The Same
If possible keep all your URL's the same for all your social media websites as this will help with your ranking within search engines and will also strengthen your brand with your followers.
5. Link Your Business Page To Your Personal Page On Facebook
In order that you capitalise on your personal facebook friends as well as your facebook business page followers, you can refer to your business, including your URL, within the information section on your personal page. This information will then show below your name and refer your "friends" to your business page
6. Create Links
Every time that someone becomes your fan on social media sites, a new link is created. It is important to link to your fan page in every way possible including from your website, blog, twitter, and LinkedIn.
You will also need to include a link to your website within one of your daily posts by using the link option.
7. Facebook Marketing
If your budget allows for paid advertising, facebook paid advertising offers a very powerful way to promote your business as you can target the audience that you wish market to, based on their likes and interests. All in all, social networking sites offer a powerful means to promote your business especially when you are starting a new business. However, as previously stated it is paramount to engage and interact with your followers to begin with, in order to build up trust. If you provide varied and interesting content daily, then eventually your followers will want to get to know more about you and what you do and will start buying from you. However, if you appear too pushy and continually try to sell, sell, sell, your followers will become bored and will stop following you which could ultimately kill your business.
Whereas using social media for business correctly will help your business to thrive.
My name is Roy Derrick and I have over 20 years experience in running my own business. Over the years I have set up and sold several successful businesses including a chain of retail stores and a construction company.
My wife Julie and I currently run a home based business that specialises in finding and sourcing the best ways to start a small, sustainable business working from home.
Business is our passion and that is why we set up Perfect Prosperity so that we could share our vast business knowledge with others to help them enjoy a better work/life balance.
Our opportunities range from businesses that can be started almost straight away for those wanting to earn extra income from home, to more advanced opportunities for those individuals wanting to replace and exceed their current salary and work less hours.
To find out how we can help YOU to find the most powerful ways to work from home and spend more quality time with YOUR family visit:
http://www.perfectprosperity.com
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