If you aren’t advertising your business through social media sites, you probably are missing out on an opportunity to reach thousands, if not millions, of customers. Depending on your business type, your customer base may spend time on Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites; you should learn how to use these sites effectively so that you can attract more customers.

Not all customers use the same social media sites; there are many sites out there, and different people prefer different types of social media. Thus, before investing in a social media marketing campaign, you should find out where most of your target audience spends its time so that you don’t waste time and money with the wrong sites.

An effective way to do this is to include a customer survey on your receipts. You can give customers an incentive for answering the survey such as a discount on merchandise or an entry into a sweepstakes. Ask customers in the survey which social media sites they prefer. You can combine this with questions about what they appreciate or don’t appreciate about business sites on social media so that you can plan your campaign appropriately.

Once you decide which social media sites to target, check out what the competition is doing. You don’t need to copy your competitors’ pages, but you can get ideas from them. Look at how your competitors use certain features of each site that you want to work with. For example, see how your competitors use the Timeline feature on Facebook or how they set up their bio on Twitter. This can help you get ideas; of course, you want and need to make your pages uniquely yours.

Social media gives you lots of opportunities to promote specials. You can offer discounts to people who sign up with your social media page; this encourages people to sign up and stay with your page. You can also announce specials on your pages before you announce them to the general public.

Remember, though, that social media is about being social, not just about advertising. It’s important that you interact with your customers on a regular basis. Don’t just post links to your products or coupons. Customers will see you as a spammer if you do this, and it’ll annoy them. Many customers will remove themselves from your page, block you or even report you for spam. To avoid getting this type of bad reputation, post nine items of interest to your customers that are not related to your product line for every advertisement you post. If you provide useful, interesting content on a regular basis, you will get a good reputation and attract customers.

Social media isn’t complicated to use, but you have to understand how it works. The basic idea to remember is that social media allows people to be social with one another from across the country or even across the globe. If you learn how to interact positively with customers over social media, you can attract a potentially limitless customer pool via these sites.