Social Media? What does it mean? How can it help my business?
Social Media Marketing is in the last few years become very big. It is a type of word of mouth advertising. How many times have you asked a friend, “Where is a great Mexican Restaurant?” Did you answer? Did they go there to eat? This happens with all kinds of businesses. Not just restaurants. It happens with hotels, cars, computers and most anything that is a product or service. It has become a means to having people tell their friends about your business and that you like it. Several well known Social Media sites are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter. There are many more that then that but we will focus in on these for the time being.
The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $17.00
You Save: $12.95 (43%)
New (27) Used (38) from $10.70(more)
In Facebook and the others, once you have an account, you will typically look up everybody in your email contact list and see if they have an account. If they do, you have an opportunity to “Friend” or “Follow” them. They then have to accept your invitation to follow them and they in turn will be following you. As your friend list grow you will see that many of your friend will post a “like” or “link” to other business, places, things and you will see what they like. You to have that same back to them. So lets say I went out to eat at that mexican restaurant and I want to rave about it to my friends, all I would have to do is post a comment with a link to their website or to the restaurant’s social page on one the networks. This telling your friends that you recommend it. Word of mouth advertising via Social Networking.
Now, if you have a business one way you can market your business is through the social pages. You can set up a business page for most every type of organization, person (public figure), or item. With these pages you will build your business online. As the social word of mouth fans out among your patrons and they friend/like your business your contact list will grow. Using mexican restaurant they could have 1000 patrons that “like” them on the network. The restaurant could then announce to those 1000 via a post to their social business page a special that if they mention Facebook they get a 10% Discount on Tuesday night. This might help the restaurant with business on a normally slow night. This is a way to mass email (kinda) contact people that like your business and would come again.
Linking your website with social media sites. This is important so that you can tell your business fans that you have a social page and that you offer specials through that site. You can also on your social page link back to your website that may have more info, prices, menus or online store where they might by something from.
There is another reason why to cross link you site to social pages. This is for search engine importance. The more there are other web sites linked to your site the more important it must be! A web page or web site is less important if there are few links linking to it and will show up lower on the list on search engines. A good example is if you were to type either of the words “get” or “download” into Google, you will get a link to Adobe Reader/Flash, Apple iTunes/Quicktime, Sun Java. These are all downloads that are needed and are linked back to with the words “Get” Flash or “Download” iTunes on so many web sites around the world that the search engines have associates those words with those companies and their applications. So what does that have to do with social marketing? You are able to post a link back to your business from another site giving it more importance.
Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $8.49
You Save: $8.46 (50%)
New (44) Used (39) from $6.59(more)
