Boost Your Business Into The Major League With Social Media Promotion!

If you are currently running or promoting a small business and are thinking about taking the next step up the ladder, why not consider social media as a way to achieve this? You probably already have at least one social media account for personal use and you will be aware of just how much of a daily part of our lives this has become recently. They are now perceived as the second generation of websites and the potential for interaction is almost limitless. Whilst hundreds of millions of social media followers use this platform for purely social reasons, there are an increasingly large amount of professionals who have discovered a more lucrative avenue. Social media advertising is usually free and can reach a huge worldwide audience if constructed correctly. This article looks at some of the platforms out there and suggests an effective method to promote your small business to the masses!

Facebook

Undoubtedly the Daddy of social media, with over half a billion active users on planet earth, this is an excellent platform for small business promotional activity. There are various ways to begin this exercise and we’ll skip the rest and concentrate on the best one. We are assuming that you already have a website that is representing your business in cyber space, and the next step is to use social media to attract visitors to this site. We’re also assuming that you have a healthy Facebook account with a reasonable number of buddies already connected to your profile. Your first step is to create a Facebook fan page that allows you to separate your business from your personal profile. You don’t need too much information at first, just a few photos and videos should be sufficient. You can then invite your Facebook friends to come and ‘like’ your business page. Once they ‘like’ the page, they will be connected and will receive regular status updates. It is probably in your best interests to develop a relationship with the fan page’s followers that will allow them to feel part of a bespoke community. Once you have created a two way trust relationship, you can begin to promote your business concern, add a link to connect the two sites. Invite some healthy conversations and be on hand to offer some expert advice. Eventually these fans may become customers, or they may share your page with their own set of friend. The name of the game is promotion and you have the opportunity to make your business known to a huge circle of social media users.

YouTube

Many of us enjoy searching for weird and wonderful videos on YouTube and it provides us with hours of free entertainment. But there is a more serious and lucrative possibility using the moving images to promote our own business interest. It is not unknown for an individual to upload a homemade video onto YouTube and for the clip to become ‘viral’ overnight. As a result, over 50 million people end up hearing about this clip and simply must watch it! Just imagine if your own business video was cool enough to reach just a fraction of that number of individuals! This is why the big boys of industry have sat up and taken notice of this fantastic marketing medium. Just record a few ‘How-To’ video clips and see what occurs. You can add links to your website and your Facebook fan page for good measure, after all it is free!

Twitter

You’ll probably already have a twitter account or at least know somebody who has one. Twitter is a blogging platform that allows the user to post regular updates regarding what they are doing and why they are doing it. This form of social media is very popular with the more famous people out there and some of them have millions of followers. You can create an account easily enough and then do a search on similar styles of business. Once you comment on a few threads, you may start to develop a following of your own. Thereafter, every update that you ‘tweet’ will appear on each of your followers’ Twitter page. As long as you keep your updates upbeat and humorous you will find that your followers may start to spread your ‘tweets’ to their own set of followers. Before long you will have an audience of ‘tweeters’ that are hanging on your every word. Just remember to promote your business at some point, as it can be so entertaining that many of us forget why we joined in the first place!

Three Of The Best?

As well as this trio of bad boys, there are another ten or so very useful social media platforms. Just do a little research and you should soon be able to pick the best one for your small business – Good Luck!