If you are interested in growing your business, a great place to start is online. With the Internet expanding the way it is, it would be of benefit to your business to incorporate social media marketing into your marketing strategy. In this article you will learn five tips for using social media as a marketing tool to increase the online presence of your business, and thus increase your customer base.
There are many benefits to setting up a social media site. One of the greatest aspects of this new form of marketing is the cost-benefit ratio. You can sign up for most of these social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or LinkedIn for free. The amount of traffic that your business might get from just having set up these websites is in itself enough to justify doing it. However, another important benefit of social media is that it is interactive. Traditional marketing was a guessing game with a one-way flow of information from you to your consumers. With social media marketing, the information is being shared. You can receive feedback and suggestions from your customers, allowing you to identify your target audience and better appeal to them.
Any good social media marketing plan begins with a ‘Conversation Map’. Like any visual learning tool, this can help you document the fast-paced world of social media in a clear way. Your business is at the center of your conversation map, receiving information from the various social media. Each social media website that you intend to utilize should surround you on the map. This tool will help you better understand the potential effect social media has on your business through online conversations. Connecting with your audience is, in this new world of marketing, the most important part.
If you are reluctant to use social media marketing because you feel it is impersonal, think again. While you can have an online personality, a podcast offers yet another layer to your social media marketing onion. A podcast is an audio file that your business can broadcast and your consumers can subscribe to. This can help you reach a new audience, but can also strengthen the connection between your business and the audience you have. A podcast gives a “voice” to your company, which is something you may feel that other social media does not offer.
Making connections is king in social media marketing, whether it be between you and your consumer, from one consumer to another, or from one social media to another. One way to build these connections is by adding social media bookmarks to your business website. By linking one page to another, you are expanding the potential associations that your website makes to other social media.
When you begin using social media to promote your business, you open up your business to a new world of potential customers. Through social media marketing, you can build connections and establish relationships that can help you increase your online presence. Follow the advice in this article and you will be growing your business with social media websites in no time.