Confused by social media? Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and
the rest? Social media is an exciting way of creating relationships and
reaching out to a wider world especially when used as a device for
business marketing and public relations. These new websites provide a
way of effectively interacting with your market. But for most effective
use, it should be optimized by setting up in a business like manner.
Using
these websites for business is about increasing website traffic,
increasing sales, increasing page views, growing brand awareness,
creating brand need and reaching out more potential customers. These
points can help you succeed:
- Social Media is all about other people not you. Try
to help other people via your chosen channels. Its not all about you,
its about helping them. So postings about issues that everyone can
relate to are useful way entering into conversation. Do not broadcast a
message, discuss an issue.
- Plan a Strategy. Plan how you are going to promote your business, don't just post random postings. Fail to plan could be planning to fail.
- Quality Postings. Create quality postings that people want to read. More people read content than create quality content.
- Connect with Users and Customers. People like to review and promote brands and ideas online. Make use of people than could help you.
- Create a Blog. Blogs are tracked by social media
sites such as Technorati, currently tracking over 110 million blogs. Get
your business blog tracked and promoted.
- Claim your blog at Technorati. Claim your social media blog so it gets indexed.
- Link to other Websites and Blogs. Search engines and web surfers rely on linking from one site to another.
- Use Video. But remember your video should connect
with others, a video broadcast about a business or service is not going
to connect with huge numbers of people. Promote a video through YouTube.
A funny, strange and maybe controversial video could get distributed
widely.
- Find relevant Micro Communities. Micro communities
are social communities such as related to education, public sector,
gardening, houses etc. These are often groups within a large website, or
forums. Although there are specialist micro sites online.
- Monitor Your Social Media sites. Try Yahoo pipes to
monitor your social channels or other sites to make it easier to manage
several social media sites such as socialmedia.com or hootesuite.com.
The most used sites at the moment are Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Flickr, Reddit and
Technorati amongst many others. Sign up to 1 or 2 of these sites to get
started, monitor how you are doing before branching into too many sites
at once.