Everyone these days wants a share of the social media pie regardless if they are in a blogging business, home business, internet marketing business, affiliate marketing or any sort of brick and mortar business. Social media seems to be the “in” thing now that must not be missed otherwise there is a perception that you’ll be left behind.
Regardless of the type of business you are in, do you first of all know how to use social media to help with your business? Do you know what you should do first? Here I would like to highlight 4 important social media strategies to consider for your business at its early stage.
1. Remove all Perceptions
Remove all these perceptions before using social media for your business.
- I only need to spend a little bit of time everyday on social media
- I will only need to this for a short time
- It is easy
- I as the owner of the business can do everything
This is my response to each of those perceptions:
- You will need to spend a significant amount of time before introducing social media for your business. I will explain this in point 2
- Getting it right won’t take a short time as explained in point 2.
- It is NOT easy.
- If you can’t stand going through all the social media jargon then hire a social media consultant
2. Do Your Research!
The first and most tempting thing to do is to start a social media account without knowing what to do. This is a recipe for disaster as you might know the social media landscape is ever changing and if you don’t understand how social media can benefit your business. So do your research! Let’s look at these list of things:
- Identify all potential social media sites that you think might help with your business. Is it Twitter or Facebook or do you need both? What about Linkedin?
- Where do your customers like to “hang out” online? Facebook, Twitter or both or somewhere else offline?
- What is the conversation like between your customers?
- What is the audience like?
- What are their buying habits?
In short it’s a matter of seeking out your audience or customers on social media sites and then understanding their behaviours.
3. Start A Social Media Account
Isn’t this obvious enough? Yes, start one but of course do your research first! You might be thinking along the same lines as me like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Let’s use Twitter as an example. So you’ve decided to set up a Twitter account for your bridal cake business. These are the things you should do.
- Make sure your twitter account name is the same or almost the same as your business. Use a Twitter username that is easy for customers to relate with your business.
- You might have already set up a twitter account for your business, so it’s a twitter account for your business but what if they would like to communicate with a real person with a twitter account. Say you’re the manager why not create another one with your name.
- Use both accounts for different purposes. The personal one to relate easier with your customer i.e queries, requests, questions, improvements, feedbacks. The business one for say coupons, discounts, announcements, business updates.
4. Find Your Customers
If you have an online business then go back to point number 2, otherwise if you have a brick and mortar business read below.
For a brick and mortar business, the beauty of using social media marketing is that you can find your audience by narrowing down to the location of your customers. It is wise to do this with hindsight on where your customers come from. These are the things you should do once you’ve done your research:
- If you have an online bridal business and you find that most of your customers come from an online bridal forum. Get in touch with them, find out what they like and their preferences are.
- What if you own a Kmart supermarket and you’re trying to reach out to your customers. You’ve also noticed that customers come from nearby suburbs. Again, you can use Twitter to localize into the area around your supermarket. You can use the advanced search on Twitter to narrow your tweets to a specific geographical location. This feature is also called Geotagging
- Consider Foursquare a location based social networking software for mobile devices.
Do you have any more tips you would like to share? Let me know what you think.
Related articles on Social Media
- Twitter Marketing Strategy Model – A basis for better social media outcomes.
- Social Media Won’t Fix Your Broken Business: 15 Success Tips
- Why Businesses Can No Longer Ignore Social Media
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Twitter: lavenderuses
October 4, 2010 at 12:34 am
I love Twitter. It has been so good for finding great posts to read and new bloggers to interact with. When I first joined up I followed those who were in my niche but as it is only a small niche I now also follow those who I have met in the blogging community and that has been great. It does take time and I want to persist and keep seeing more visitors to my site and eventaully monetize my blog. When I do I will already have a community who can spread the word and social media sites are a good way to do it.
Patricia Perth Australia
Patricia@lavenderuses recently posted..Lavender Products- Why Choose Organic Lavender
yeah twitter is very helpful for bloggers as well as businesses too. I think for blogging you need to look for the right ppl to connect with on Twitter so that they will help you go up and improve. The tricky thing with business is that it might take a while for business to understand how to use it especially large business enterprises or brick and mortar business.
Twitter: webmaster_serve
October 13, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Before jumping into social media sites, you should first check out each of the social media sites and do research to determine relevancy by searching for your brand name, your competitors, and your target keywords. When social media is done correctly, relationships will build naturally. You can do this by subscribing to blogs in your industry and by making a list of influences who are relevant to your business.
Social media sites are good marketing tool if used correctly.
Biodun | UK ecommerce forum recently posted..HOSTGATORCom COUPON CODE
You’re correct there. I think the key thing about social media is to get your bases right. Otherwise it will be very difficult to reverse it later on
Twitter: markbell10
October 17, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Bryan,
You have made excellent points here. I agree that it’s not as straight forward as people like to think. Just because you’re using facebook or twitter or other sites doesn’t mean you just say hello and hope people come to your site. It’s like forming whole new relationships. You need to prove your worth and tailor your approach for each individual – much like we do in the real world.
Thank you for sharing this!
Mark Bell recently posted..Twitter Dummy Learn to market your website effectively
Hey Mark
Thx for stopping by. I think whether or not you are blogging or social media, you need to prove why people should listen to you. It is certainly not easy at the early stage as you might have realized and that is when most people drop out. Social media is a big thing but and you’ll get lots of random clicks to your site or blog but the challenge is to get more targeted follower who have a reason to listen to you.