Social Media Presence – 3 Insider Tips to Gain a Social Media Presence

Social Media- Making It Count

Social media is a great tool for a business, but only if used correctly.  Your social media presence puts your message into the hands of the consumers; they can post bad reviews, trash your product, and advise their friends to never come to your establishment. Consumers can list what’s great that you offer and what could use some redesign. They can also provide rave reviews that result in your sales going up exponentially. Quite simply, that is a lot of power to put in the hands of a consumer – use it wisely.

There are three key elements that you should keep in mind.

- Relationships

Many businesses make the mistake of trying to use social media as a platform for sales pitches. If you do this, at best you will be ignored; at worse, trashed for trying a cheap ploy to make a sale. Either way, you are wasting a great tool for your business. Instead, focus on making connections with people and developing professional relationships.

When you post acknowledgements, such as a consultant posting “Congrats to XYZ Company for getting the ABC project” or a restaurant posting about an event it is hosting, you promote your product or service while making a personal connection. Those types of posting draw to mind questions to the reader, such as “How did XYZ Company get the ABC project?” The answer is, of course, through the work of the consultant. In the same token, why is the event being hosted by the restaurant? Maybe it was a prize won in a monthly promotion or it could be because the restaurant has a belly dancer the first Monday of every month. In this manner, your business is promoted subliminally while a relationship is built with your clientele.

Additionally, these examples demonstrate how a professional posting would read. You want to establish a professional relationship with your customers, not a social one. By and large, they do not care about your personal life – remember that.

- Exposure

Having an active social media presence also affords your business exposure. If your business is involved in social media, it makes it easier for someone to post a comment. While people can do this with or without your business having an online presence, if you are involved in social media, you can respond to the comment, start a conversation, or develop a poll for the issue.

- Local

Lastly, social media for your business should have a local element. You can connect and build professional relationships with other businesses in your area, be they complimentary products/services, businesses with the same demographic, or businesses with similar offerings. The connections you make can serve to create a micro-network with the other businesses. Not only will it serve to increase awareness of your business, but it can also lead to promotional events and other mutually beneficial opportunities.

By and large, social media is free to individuals and businesses to use. It can be tempting to read whatever article about how Facebook saved this business or Twitter revitalized that business. You may be so inspired that you start a Facebook page or Twitter account for your business and start posting and promoting your business right away, but think again. Social media for business is light years away from the way you use your social account. If you try to approach social media like you do your friends, you will likely be unsuccessful. Additionally, if you try to make social media into a sales vehicle, it will simply not work. Remember, when gaining a major social media presence, you are putting a great deal of power in your consumers; while the rewards can be great, so can failure. To make sure this does not happen to your business, make sure that you are using social media properly.

Increase Online Visibility – How To Increase Online Visibility In 3 Easy Steps

Step 1- Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about improving the volume and quality of traffic to your website.  SEO gives your site “web presence” by optimizing pages so that, when a potential customer performs a search, your business will appear higher in the search results listing, making it more likely that you will be contacted before your competitors.  Pages can be optimized for global searches, local searches, image searches, video searches, or industry-specific searches to increase online visibility.

Basically, SEO uses the knowledge of how search engines work, and the way people search, to benefit your business.  Optimizing a website or webpages for searches involves editing the actual content of the site as well as modifying the coding of the site (such as HTML) in such a way that its relevance to certain keywords is increased.  Barriers to the effective search engine indexing are also altered or removed.

Optimizing your website also involves a variety of other techniques to increase its search ranking.  Pages within your website may be cross-linked (one page links to another in the same site) to give prominence to the main page.  The meta-tags of a page, those descriptors that exist in the code but are not seen, are also altered to advantage.

Step 2- Email Marketing Services

Email marketing is a type of direct marketing; it involves transmitting advertising messages to a target audience via email.  Email marketing is a great way to communicate directly with your customers.  In fact, more buyers prefer to receive an advertisement or sales message via email than any other form of direct marketing, including by telephone or mail.  In addition, email marketing is extremely cost-effective.

You can use email marketing services for your business by sending emails in order to acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to make a purchase, such as by advertising special rates or a sale or by providing detailed information about a product you think would suit their needs.  Email marketing services can also be used to build loyalty in your current customer base and are a perfect way of encouraging repeat business.

Email marketing is also green and it can even be automated to save you time.  However, proceed with caution.  When email marketing is not designed professionally, it can be difficult for buyers, and email filters, to distinguish between legitimate email marketing and spam messages.  To make sure that your email marketing campaign will not wind up in a junk mail folder somewhere, consider hiring a professional to make email marketing work for you.

Step 3- Social Media Management

Social media is something on everyone’s lips today, but what about the management of it?  Social media is a free resource and one of the best ways to increase online visibility and get the word out about a product, service, or company when used correctly.

There are two primary ways that social media management is used.  The first is through the social media itself.  Aspects such as RSS feeds, sharing, user rating and polling, etc. have the power to involve your customer base in way that is virtually unprecedented. You can get opinions, ask for recommendations, explain product functionality, and really add a face and a personality to your business.  Social media may also be used in a promotional way through activities such as blogging, commenting on blogs, participation in discussion groups, updating social networking profiles, etc.

Whatever method used, you are essentially creating word-of-mouth and developing a brand image or reputation through social media.  Using social media effectively involves more than just marketing and brand building, although they are important elements. Social media is becoming an increasing strategic element in knowledge management, specifically product/service development, recruiting, employee relationships, customer relations, and business development.  However, effective use of social media may require professional management, Hiring a professional to provide social media management is over 36 percent more effective than doing it yourself, and that is if you are social media savvy.

Combining these 3 powerful steps into your online marketing arsenal will help you have a major online presence.  These 3 steps will increase online visibility and attract traffic on demand.

Most of the public online has shifted their trust regarding social networks. Online and offline businesses are following this trend. You will be able to find millions of interactions happening online each and every day and thousands every minute.  This has created an extremely involved crowd that interacts and engages around specific and targeted topics.  This concept allows businesses to use social media marketing techniques to increase online visibility.

Businesses that are engaged in this shift have the upper hand to be connected to their highly targeted audiences and take advantage of increased leads, product sales, and market awareness. Businesses not taking part of the social networking evolution will continue to use their marketing and advertising assumptions.

Companies needs to realize Social Media and marketing online is very diverse from conventional marketing and advertising. Social media marketing is about producing relationships, assemble trust, and the publishing of interesting content to share with others.  It’s not about selling up front.  If completed correctly, the business’ leads, sales and recognition will follow.

By participating in social media marketing, you may promote your brand name by generating your presence on well-known Social Media networks. These channels includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Stumbleupon, and many others.  There are a lot of these channels on the web and some are centered on a particular niche or topic.  Every single channel that you are going to use has its own strategies and rules of engagement that must be taken into consideration when making your presence.

Social media marketing gives you access to audiences that share the same viewpoints and interests online.  Popular social networking platforms include blogs, micro blogs, interpersonal bookmarking, wikis, discussion forums and a lot more. The media of social networking can commonly include any kind of advertising from pictures and video to audio and text.

If you are in the process of developing your social media marketing, take time and research which online avenue you will probably be using to achieve your goals and how these systems work.

What can you expect from social media marketing?

* Increase brand name awareness

* Effective backlinks that will help with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

* Targeted visitors to your website

* The potential to interact with customers and future prospects

* Increased gross sales and increased business leads

So, is it all hype when it comes to social media marketing?

The social media marketing revolution is here to stay.  Men and women are tired of the way they are being marketed to.   They want to interact and share their point of view.  Social media marketing is seriously not just hype but a potent promoting way to enhance your company’s attention and to build authority.  Do not be left behind if your competition is busy marketing and advertising by means of social networking to increase their profits.