Friday 13 April 2012

Social Media Networking: An Important Part Of Business

Social media is one of the many tools that every business will find invaluable in helping them to increase public awareness of their company and their brand, with some of the main factors to measure being the speed of the company's growth, the number of people who see their social media sites, how many customers are generated via leads, and how much traffic the social media outlets drive to the company's website. Using social media is a great way to impact your business positively, and it is important that you use social media to generate a more positive image for your company.

It is important that you don't only focus on doing regular activities that will help to increase sales, but that you use your social media outlets at the same time. You will find that a huge number of people use sites like Twitter and Facebook, and you will find that you can use these websites to track the people who come in contact with your products. However, you should be doing other activities at the same time, such as using newsletters, signup forms, sharing your content, and finding alternative methods aside from social media to drive potential customers to your website.

Your content needs to be relevant in order for people to visit your site, and it should be engaging and interesting as well. You need to provide your readers with information that will benefit them, will interest them, and will provide them with solutions to their problems. You need to monitor the traffic you are getting to see what it is that is interesting people visiting your site, as that will help you to know how to improve the content you are posting. You can also get visitors to share their thoughts and comments with you, or use interactions such as "Likes", all for the purpose of finding out what it is that is interesting new customers.

It is essential that you spend time researching what people are saying about your company, such as in online reviews. You need to know who is saying what, and where people are talking about it the most. This way you will be able to join conversations and answer people's questions or solve problems, all in the intent to improve your customer relations. You can help mitigate problems just by knowing what is being said by people about your service.

Most importantly, social media will help you to keep track of the places from which your product is receiving the most attention, as well as the reasons for the attention. You will learn whether the feedback is negative or positive, and you can find which the most negative areas are so you can work on improving them. It is essential to use social media to help you monitor your impact on the public, as that will be one of the most effective marketing strategies. You will be able to find what areas of your business need work, and thus you can improve those areas in order to improve the public's perception of you.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6993003

Wednesday 11 April 2012

How Should Social Media Impact Your Social Marketing Strategies?

Due to what has been called a hunger for connectivity, over half of the population of the United States is on Facebook: 152.9 million as of February 2012. Many older Americans tell their friends that they joined Facebook so that they can see what their adult children are up to. Since their children and grandchildren seldom call them, they join Facebook to stay in touch.

For the younger generations, the immediacy of connectivity offered by Facebook and Twitter has become essential. Social networking, a term coined by Mark Zuckerberg when he founded Facebook, was initially predicted to be just another passing phase but has become a staple in the seemingly bottomless need for instant information of this twenty-first century. Launched in 2004, active users of Facebook grew from an initial million to over 750 million in 2011.

Coupling these data with the fact that one out of three purchases are bought on- line, it should be clear that current marketing strategies should change in order to conform. But how?

Largely in the experimental stages of new methods of advertising, a few large companies like Starbucks, Walmart and the Palms, an upscale casino in Las Vegas, have made what they consider decent in- roads into the new culture of social network users. Taking advantage of those users who are "influencers" in their network, the companies have solicited these individuals to post their product and to "like" them in exchange for coupons which can be redeemed for cash or for product. These influencers are deemed as such by their followers due to the power of their personality, opinions and or expertise.

Those of us with a product we know is excellent can easily experiment with some of these same methods. For example, we can locate loyal customers who use Twitter and then offer them discounts for each ten tweets about our product to their followers. Similar methods can be offered to those who like us on Facebook; really these are just variations on the testimonials network marketers have used for years.

The emergence of social media has not changed the fundamental axiom of marketing: "WIIFM" or what's in it for me? If anything, the principle is magnified through 153 million social media active users with friends numbering between one and three hundred. If they like us and our products, be assured that they will talk about it.

The tried and true essentials of marketing remain: a trusted, consistently high quality product with excellent customer service. These are even more essential now than in prior years due to the number of sites to receive purchasing advice. Where only five years ago, Consumer Reports was the sole source of receiving honest feedback on a fairly limited range of products, contemporary curious potential buyers can now check out customer satisfaction with almost any product at on-line at sites like Google, Yelp, and Trusted Opinion.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6970849