Social Media has emerged from one of many concepts of online socializing to the mainstay of the modern-day Internet. It’s worthwhile to say that websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and similar are certainly not the first platforms for online socializing, but are among the first to rely on each user’s real identity.
Although developed as recreational websites which allow people to socialize and improve online communication among friends, social media has become places where people look for varied information, including those related to living, work, employment, product, services and commerce.
To know whether a social network is good for your business you need to know the purpose of each social network. Today, each network has its scope and purpose which makes it different from others.
To know which social media is good for your business you need to define:
- Which way of representation best suits your business (video, images, audio, long announcements or short ones).
- What is your coverage area (a neighborhood, town, city, multiple locations, or maybe states/countries)
- Who are your main clients and customers (are they people or other businesses, what is their gender, age, occupation and interests).
Once you defined these three points, you have to see which online marketing strategy is good for you. One of the biggest advantages of social media business use is convenience. You don’t need to run a website for your business, its online marketing strategy can rely entirely on business profiles on social networks, which are as easy to use as personal ones.
However, in many cases it’s still better to have a website for your business. But even then, social media profiles should be linked to it.
If you just made your business a website, you need to increase its outreach using search engine optimization (SEO), but it will certainly take much time. During that period, people will be unaware of the website. Social media profiles can help you solve this problem, you can use them to endorse the website’s use of paid promotion plans. For example, Facebook’s page promotion packages enable you to define types of people who will be the target of your campaign.
If all is done in a persuasive and catchy manner, you will have a high inflow of new followers of your social media profiles, and there’s where you will put links to your business website’s pages you wish them to see.
However, if you want to run social media profiles for your business, you need to know that two-way communication is a must. All suggestions, complaints, proposals, business and job offers, or anything else people send to your wall, inbox, or comments on a post, need to be responded to. Most people recognize social media as places where businesses running their profiles need to respond to all relevant messages, and it’s a part of the “netiquette”. It’s something you need to stick to strictly.