Using Social Networking Effectively for Your Business
Social networking sites are more than just tools, to keep in touch with and keep track of your friends, make new friends, find old friends and spy on strangers. They can be very useful for small business owners, if used effectively. With social networking sites, small business owners can shape the image of a company or a brand, advertise to consumers, receive customer feedback and make consumers feel more involved with their businesses.
Twitter allows you to communicate directly with all of your followers, with one simple message. It also allows your followers/customers to communicate with you. Use twitter to ask your customers what they would like to see from your business, to tell them when the next sale is, or to offer a discount to the first 100 people who show up to your store on a certain day.
Kogi Korean BBQ, a traveling food truck used twitter to inform followers where it will be located at, as there was never a set schedule. This kept customers on their toes and interested.
Facebook has grown from a social networking site for college students, to one of the top sites on the web…period.
Create a Fanpage
“A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users,” (Facebook). Facebook users can become fans of your business’s page and posts made on the page will appear in Facebook newsfeeds. You can also track your page’s comments and visitors.
Join Groups
Search for groups that are related to the industry that your business is in. After joining these groups, you can start and join discussions, post on walls and upload links regarding your business. This information will be received by other members of the group, who are self-proclaimed as interested in the industry.
Update Status Regularly
When you update your status, it appears in your friends’ newsfeeds. You can use status updates to notify users of sales/promotions and new products/services.
Unlike other social networking sites, LinkedIn is designed to maintain and cultivate business relationships between professionals.
According to an article titled “Work that Net: The ABCs of Online Social Networking” that appeared in the April, 2009 edition of The Green Sheet, there are “Eleven ways to love LinkedIn.” Below are five of the 11 ways.
- Increase visibility
- Improve Google Page Rank
- Perform blind, “reverse” and company reference checks
- Gauge the health of a company
- Ask for Advice
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] social media for business has been a hot topic on this blog. (See Using Social Networking Effectively for Your Business, and Using Social Media for Your Business). Of course, with society and technology changing so [...]