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Guest Blog Post - How to Use Social Media to Target New Customer

by Robert Woodford

The online social media environment has grown in size over the last few years to the point that it now takes up a major percentage of the entire internet’s activity. Facebook alone is home to just over one billion users and the other major networks such as Twitter and Google+ have millions or hundreds of millions more users in their ranks. This is not to mention the dozens of social networking niche sites such as LinkedIn that cater specifically to online marketing needs.

Needless to say, these online social environments represent an absolutely enormous potential marketplace that you need to involve yourself in and create a marketing strategy for. Success in social media is not only something too big to ignore it’s also a marketplace that is young enough for you to benefit from in ways that might not be as competitively possible if you delay too long in promoting yourself on the networks.

Follow through on your social media marketing with these 5 tips and enjoy the results you receive.

social media

1. Pick the Right Social Platform

There are many social media platforms out there, but you don’t need to be on all of them. Your platform of choice should be based on the type of target audience you’re hunting for. For example, Facebook may be enormous but it can also be quite hard on business services advertisers, who don’t get much attention from a largely social attention seeking audience that’s logging on to socialize more than anything else. On the other hand, social networks like LinkedIn are specifically designed for promotion as a provider of professional services, so if your business offers these or helps service professionals in some way, LinkedIn is an ideal niche.

The bottom line is that you should know what kind of social network your target audience uses most and focus the majority of your efforts there. Advertising on the wrong network is like putting up an ad in a foreign language that your audience can’t read.

 2. Share and Distribute Value

quality

Unlike typical internet marketing, distribution through social networks, especially viral distribution, depends almost completely on a perception of either entertainment or information value. People will look at your posts and content, as well as sharing them with their friends, if they think that what you’re posting is either interesting, funny or very helpful all by itself. If you’re trying to spread the word organically through either Facebook, Twitter or any other social network, you can’t rely so much on classical advertising spots; you need to post actual useful content either in the form of articles, infographics or videos.

 3. Spread Videos through your social Accounts

An excellent example of providing value while also self-promoting is the use of video URL’s to movies you’ve created for wither YouTube, Vimeo or some other platform. Create films that don’t just tell the audience about your business.  Instead, offer some kind of instruction material or helpful information that also happens to link back to a website that you also own. For example: if your business is geared towards financial services, show videos that explain how to prepare online tax forms or what the best banks to open accounts in are. This will attract sharing because it’s useful; it’s helpful to your social audience and not just a shallow marketing gimmick.

By sharing valuable content with your social audience, you’re also building trust in yourself as someone who not only knows what they’re talking about but is also offering quality in their niche; your content will demonstrate both.

4. Optimize your Website for Social Media

Your website will probably have its own set of unique visitors coming around on a regular basis, some of them old fans and others newcomers that were guided to you by a search engine. Take advantage of this by doing two things:

First, make sure that, aside from the usual business services/products and contact pages, your site also contains a blog that you update with regular fresh and valuable content within your niche; the stuff you write about needs to be informative and relevant to your clients needs.

Second, having created such content, whether it’s audio, video or written info, offer social sharing options for all of it right there on your website. Visitors should be able to share every single page of your site and every piece of interactive content you create to their favorite social networks through clearly visible social media buttons or tags.

You should also connect your social accounts and your website itself as thoroughly as possible by having links back to your site content visible regularly on your social updates, and by having general social “follow” buttons on all of your websites pages.

5. Be Mobile Compatible 

Social Media Mobile

More and more social media accounts are being accessed through mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones. This number represents millions or even hundreds of millions of daily visits. If your social accounts are posting excellent content, linking back to your website and attracting interest, but you have a domain that isn’t mobile device viewing compatible, you’re in big trouble. Instead of losing thousands of potential visitors because they can’t even read your content, make the extra effort to create a base business website that can also be read through smart phones and mini tablets once it’s found because of your social media distribution efforts.

About the Author: Robert Woodford has been covering social media topics online for over 5 years. When he is not covering social media or free email marketing, you can find him honing his guitar skills or spending time with family

 To your Success, 

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