With “Social media techniques part two” article, I will be talking in more detail about how social media platforms can help you create positive brand awareness, increase your popularity and get traffic into your site.
Originally this post was intended for beginners or intermediate profiles, but I think it’s useful to share with you all. Just a second, you probably should read part one first.
I will talk you through how social platforms allow clever businesses to use them as an effective marketing tool. They’re ideal to gather intel, check who’s talking about your service or product, brand etc. Be ahead of your competitors, by reading and learning from these case studies, infographics, blogs, tutorials, and many other useful services.
How to promote your brand efficiently using social media techniques?
Building brand reputation demands clever and energetic planning from the beginning. When building your online authority you have to consider many tactics, all based on same principle – “Serve and be helpful” leading to more “Customer interaction“. But in order to connect with people and make an impression you have to give them relevant, attractive good content – such as ebooks, links, embedded videos etc. That’s why social networking is such a bright tool to promote your business. You probably have noticed that social media behavior around you is informatively rich, spontaneous but frugal, and can be very interactive with multiple online users like yourself, existing customers and /or with opinion-formers that generally like to directly and indirectly influence your market or community.
This could be highly rewarding, giving you numerous openings to demonstrate your savoir-faire or expertise and increase your reputation. Don’t you agree?
These services are known as ” social media” and “content sharing”:
- Micro-blogging and instant messaging platforms (Twitter, Messenger..)
- Social networking sites ( facebook, MySpace..)
- Social bookmarking sites ( Digg, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Reddit ..)
Whether you’re sharing product ideas, images, or news with your family, friends, colleagues or complete strangers the rules of engagement are often relaxed, friendly and/or professional (for most of these platforms), well wait until you get your sales pitch out.
From my view point, inexperienced people who subscribe to online social groups, attempting to sell their products or ideas are often ignored or simply not tolerated; often the collective voice will tell you to leave or go sell your stuff elsewhere. That could be frightening and unpleasant, but saying that you shouldn’t feel rejected and accept it is a small lesson for the future. You ‘re there to share things, you’ll be engaging and building your brand’s reputation.
Example: some small businesses rapidly learn how to post photo-product sharing with the recently launched Pinterest website – it allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as product interest, events, community interests, etc. and they promote it wisely creating revenue I am sure.
Does social media reputation pay off?
Yes it does, if you follow the online rules, you will benefit from people’s conversations as they happen. I will illustrate here some ideas of how you can and should engage with prospects or online customers in a real and appropriate way. But first there are a few things you need to know; learn how to find relevant conversation topics, or groups, and a faster way to do that is to use Google or twitter to find your peers – example tweet #chocolate and start following and share them.
Secondly, connect with people. Put yourself in the shoes of a site visitor, and imagine that when you go to a particular site to find information you would generally read from the top and scan along. Most likely if you can’t find what you are looking for straight away, you will end up clicking from page to page, until you decide to leave that website and never come back. Sound familiar? To avoid this happening, remember:
- Post attractive and relevant links
- Insert images with good AlT text or infographics (Fun or specific images)
- Include social media icons to allow sharing
- Call to action where appropriate.
Excellent platforms to get you talking and increase traffic:
- facebook (750,000,000 – Estimated Monthly Visitors)
- Twitter (250,000,000 – Estimated Monthly Visitors)
- LinkedIn (112,000,000 – Estimated Monthly Visitors)
- Pinterest ( 85,500,000 – Estimated Monthly Visitors)
- Myspace ( 70,500,000 – Estimated Monthly Visitors)
- Google+ (65,000,000 – Estimated Monthly Visitors)
- DeviantArt ( 25,500,000 – Estimated Monthly Visitors)
- ExploreB2B ( Creates a new social interaction space for meeting relevant businesses )
Online reputation can build or destroy your brand.
One of the most important factors when you are trying to generate traffic. To gain reputation you have to be reached and linked from other sources – we’re talking about authoritative sites or platforms which we’ll partially focus later on in part three.
Why should you set-up social media metrics?
Obvious answer is: How can you evaluate your social presence and progress?
Many businesses are wondering how they can reduce time spend on all these platforms? One of the common challenges that marketers, social managers and business owners are facing on daily basis – the eternal time management. You’re probably asking yourself this: can we automate some tasks? Yes, as far I am concerned this isn’t an easy solution.
Here is social media tool I strongly recommend:
Select social management platforms with clear metrics or dashboards to help you control progress such HootSuite, TweetDeck or Social Oomph
I am not recommending any in particular – But these social management tools allow you to check on your competitors marketing actions, analyse data streams, set up alerts, create custom groups, control activity, and schedule updates so you can automate little or some of the social media process. While you won’t want to over-automate, social communication dashboards can guide and make the process of using social media for business smooth and efficient.
Hope this article can help you develop or start your social media strategy – do let us know how you get on. If you like what you just read, please share it.
If you need any help contact us today for an informal chat -Tel: 01252 679885
Related Information:
