It can be very easy to promote your business when you take advantage of social media marketing. By simply maintaining and linking several pertinent social media marketing sites, you can increase your sales of products and services and establish good relationships with your customers and potential customers. By following the tips presented here, you can establish a positive relationship in the exciting, opportunity-filled world of social media marketing.

Begin by establishing an interesting variety of social media pages. Some of the most popular and effective pages include Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube. If the social media website has lots of traffic and you do a good job of presenting your business there, you can expect the traffic to your business web site to increase.

One good way to choose the right websites for your business is to check out the competition. Visit your competitors’ business web sites and see which social media websites they belong to. These would be good choices for you along with any that particularly appeal to you personally.

When you have your pages at your social media websites established, be sure to place links to them on your business web site. Of course, you must also link your pages to one another to keep traffic flowing. If your business has an excellent rating with the Better Business Bureau or other popular organization that helps ensure integrity, be sure to place this icon on each of your social media websites as well as on your business web site. This will help build customer confidence and trust.

In addition to placing links to your social media websites on your business pages, be sure to also send out a newsletter informing your existing customers that you have joined some social media web sites. This will help attract visitors to your pages. In your newsletter, you might include a promotion for people who add you to their social media contacts. For example, you might provide a “percent off” coupon for your products and services. A friendly and welcoming gesture such as this can get your social media venture off to a great start!

After your initial offer, it’s a good idea to follow up with regular contests to keep people interested in your pages and visiting frequently. One great way to generate excellent content for your social media web sites as well as excitement among your customers is to hold a photo contest. Ask your customers submit photos of themselves with your products or the results of your services. You can either have visitors vote on the photos to select the best as the winner, or provide each person who submits a photo with a raffle ticket. You could even do both! It’s important to have all of the participants in your social media web sites feel that they’re part of the process and that they’re winners simply by being associated with you.

A variation on the photo contest concept is an article or essay contest. Existing customers can write about their experiences with your business. In this way, you get great unique and original content while generating excitement among your customer base. There’s almost no end to the types of contests you can hold. They’re proven and fun way to improve traffic to your web sites and boost your business.

Providing coupons to give your customers money off is also an excellent idea. Everyone likes to save money, and your followers will visit frequently to find out what coupons you have on offer. You can offer printable coupons to local customers, or if you are not a brick and mortar business, you can offer coupon codes that your customers can redeem online.

Be sure to update your information regularly and add a personal touch. In addition to information about your promotions, products and services, add a small amount of appropriate personal information. Use your best judgment to decide what is too much information and what is just right.

When you choose to add social media marketing to your promotional campaigns, you’re making a very smart choice if you’re able to keep up with it and keep it fun and exciting for your potential customers. Social media marketing gives you access to millions, or even billions of potential customers worldwide. By following the tips presented here, you can get a wise start on the best use of social media marketing.