29 September 2011

Social media advertising

If you are new to social media advertising to promote your business, now is the time to start. Being one of the first in your field to successfully use social media as an advertising tool shows innovation.

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Social media advertising

Social media usage is increasing month by month, last year Facebook gained it’s 500 millionth member, that’s 8% of the world’s population of which around 26 million are in the UK.

Using social media as a marketing tool is considered to be one of the most effective strategies you can use to promote your business. Building a profile and growing a network of followers and fans is only the first steps, in order to make social media advertising a success for your business it is important to follow a few simple rules.

As a business it is important to know who is using the social media site so you can promote your product to your target audience. One of the major benefits of advertising on a social networking site is that businesses can take advantage of the users demographic information and target their adverts appropriately. For example a large number of Bebo and Myspace users are 17 and under. Compare these figures to Facebook and Twitter where over 60% of users are aged 35 or over.

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Incorporating your businesses social media advertisements with a social media presence can give a good impression to your targeted demographic, for one it makes you look tech savvy, it gives your customers a good connection with you therefore making you a business they can trust and respect.

Having a social media presence also helps generate a higher ranking with Google. Comments and posts from potential and existing customers generates an organic listing for your website which means the potential customer has more than one option to click on your business when searching for you in a search engine.

Just setting up a Twitter or a Facebook account will not get you more sales but here are some ideas that might.

Get LIKES and FOLLOWERS

Why not start email marketing, send a message to your subscribers or existing customers to let them know about your fan pages and consider including a link to them in every email template.

To attracted new and existing customers to LIKE / FOLLOW your company generally an exclusive promotion is a good place to start.

With Facebook you can setup some static fbml, which lets you create a dynamic facebook landing page with a “reveal tab”, that contains content that is visible only to fans of your page. The more valuable your incentive is, the more people will be compelled to click the “Like” button to access it.

Links from your site

Putting links from your website to your social media pages not only tells people your on Facebook, Twitter etc… it links everything together, which will help you in the search engine rankings.

Facebook lets you connect your Facebook page to Twitter, which is an excellent way to convert your twitter followers into facebook fans.

Using this strategy will cause all of your posts to be sent to twitter, with a link back to the Facebook version of the post.

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Printed Media

If your thinking that there is no space on your business card or flyer for links to social media sites your could be wrong, because all links can be shortened for example, Facebook urls can be shortened from facebook.com to fb.com.

Handing someone a business card gives the customer your contact information, but also it can effect the first impression of your business.

Opting for a cheap badly designed template business card could end up costing you more money that it would save you. Adding things like QR Barcodes to your print will show your customers your a forward thinking business. Blog coming soon on how to use QR Barcodes.

Social media marketing is here to stay, with this in mind whether you have a strategy or not why not give us a call to talk about developing your business.