How To Use Social Media To Promote Your Small Business

Today, no matter what you sell or where you sell it (online or from your brick and mortar location) you can bet that one thing is happening every single day; people are talking about your business online. Now, there’s an old saying about the fact that any publicity is good publicity. Frankly, we don’t buy that. The reason is simply because, unless you’re a big celebrity or sports car, negative reviews and comments online can only hurt your business, not help it. Not only that but, with hordes of people flocking to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter every single day, if they’re knocking on your door and you’re not answering, they’re going to find another door to knock on.

With that in mind we put together a blog about how to use social media to promote your business. It doesn’t matter if your business is online, off-line or a combination of the two, this blog should give you some excellent pointers and advice for getting the word out to the public about who you are, what you offer and why they should be buying from you, using social media. Enjoy.

Before you can begin any conversation about promoting your business with social media you must first answer this question; what is it exactly that you are trying to promote? What are the specific assets that your company has that you should be talking about? Who are the customers that your product or service are targeted to? If you don’t know the answers to these basic questions then, no matter what you do, you’re not going to get the best results.

Your next step is to determine which social media websites are going to be the best for your particular product or service. For example, if you manufacture women’s clothing and fashion accessories you will definitely want to have a Pinterest site as well as Facebook and Twitter. The reason is that on Pinterest you will find people who are much more interested in seeing what you have to offer rather than reading about it. The reason to be on Facebook and Twitter is basically because both of these social sites have tremendous amounts of traffic. Determining which social media websites are the best for you is an important task and should be taken quite seriously

Once you’ve decided to jump in to social media with both feet you should find yourself a good social media managing program. One of the best is called HootSuite, a program which allows you to manage all of your social sites from one page as well as schedule messages, ‘tweet’ in real time and find out what your click-through statistics are.  There are several different social media managing websites available so make sure to do your research and find the one that’s best suited for your business.

In order to get any sort of traction from your social media websites you’re going to have to post new, interesting and relatable content on a regular basis. The fact is, social media is really not about advertising but about giving people something of value to attract them to your brand, business or service. Once you’ve attracted them and they come to you with questions or concerns, then you can hit them with the hard sell. (Actually, hitting them with the soft sell first is probably a better idea.)

Finding websites that you can link to (and that will want to link to your website) is also very important if you want to promote your business using social media. Sites like LinkedIn and Google+ are great to link to but finding as many websites that are in the same industry or have similar interests as your business is vital for growing a large fan base and increasing the chance that people will come to you to make a purchase. They come to you and find great links and go to great sites and find links to you.

We’ve already talked about posting content. The thing about content is that, if it’s interesting or valuable, it will usually get comments, questions and remarks. Your job is to monitor your social media websites (remember HootSuite above?) and answer those questions, refer to those remarks and have comebacks for those comments. Doing this will show people that you not only check your social media sites regularly but that you actually care about what people are saying on them. This is called engagement and is one of the most vital factors to getting a real following on any social media website.

Engagement can be as simple as following someone on Twitter, re-tweeting their comments to your followers, liking someone’s comments on Facebook or following them on Pinterest or LinkedIn. These are the little things that you should do every single day in order to not only prove to people that you care about what they are talking about but also to encourage them to share what you are talking about.

Basically what you need to do is find a handful of social sites you like, update them constantly, add new content regularly and engage with your followers as much as possible.  Over time this will build and build and, one day, you’ll have more followers than you ever thought possible and revenues that match.

All set? Good.  Now get started using social media, keep up with it and come back to visit us here regularly for more info on how to grow your brand, increase revenues and other excellent info. See you then.