Websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were originally viewed as social networking sites but soon became an important tool for social media marketing for business.
However, it soon became apparent to savvy, forward-thinking businesses that these sites could be utilised as promotional tools for their products and services. With this, social media marketing was born.
As a result of this realisation, the manner in which businesses communicate and interact with their customers has been completely transformed. If you’re not following suit, your business is missing out on a huge amount of exposure and potential custom.
If you have an online business (or an offline one for that matter), it’s absolutely crucial that you sign up for both a Facebook and Twitter account at the very least, although LinkedIn should be a consideration too. These are the most widely used social media sites available, and therefore the most powerful resources.
Get Friends & Followers!
By signing up to these sites, you’ll be able to give your business greater exposure online, and post information about your products and services, such as discounts, 2-for-1 offers and new releases, to name just a few.
If you post useful, quality content that provides value for the reader, then more and more people will “follow” you (in Twitter’s case) or “LIKE” your page (on Facebook), which will help you to build positive, long-term relationships with customers who might not have previously found you.
Naturally, the more friends and followers you have, the more potential customers you’ll be able to promote too, and this is where social media marketing can be profitable.
After all, you’ll be able to search for people in YOUR niche who might be interested in YOUR products, and then look to befriend people who follow them, thus pulling in more and more targeted prospects that you might be able to promote to in the future.
Improve Public Relations
Another advantage of social media marketing is that it allows you to follow what’s being said about your products and services, and react to any negative news flow. So if any complaints or negative comments appear on your pages (or your customers’ pages), you can head them off and deal with them before they get out of hand, and before they begin to damage your company and its reputation.
This ability to monitor what’s being said about you and your business, and respond positively, is absolutely crucial to your long-term success.
The fact is, the growth of the internet has made it incredibly easy for people to post derogatory remarks about individuals and companies, knowing that these comments will reach a huge audience, very quickly. So spotting these comments, and dealing with them in a professional and positive manner can be very beneficial in terms of PR.
Be Alert
Talking about monitoring what’s being said about you, here are two fantastic tools that will enable you to do just that.
Google Alerts – All you need to do here is type in a relevant search phrase (such as your business name or the name of your product, for example) and whenever that phrase is mentioned online, you’ll be sent an email telling you when and where it was found.
Social Mention – Similarly, this social media search and analysis tool will send you an email alert every time your chosen phrase is mentioned online, enabling you to keep up to speed with what’s being said about you and your business! For both of these tools, I’ve requested an alert every time my business name, BlueFlameDesign, is mentioned.
Again, this is great if someone has posted something uncomplimentary about one of your products, your business, or you personally, as it enables you to spot it quickly and deal with the issue before any negative press circulates and grows.
Knowing the importance of being a customer focussed and building reputable and trustworthy relationships with my clients, I am lucky to have never received negative press or complaints, but I know of a lot of businesses that have. These tools are an absolute god-send for them.
So if you want to expand your business and reach more customers, make sure you sign up to some social media marketing sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, and use others like Google Alerts and Social Mention to keep track of what people are saying about you and your business.
If you do, you’ll have more contacts, which can lead to more customers, which will give greater and wider communication capability and an improved online PR machine.