I cannot believe how much marketing has changed since I started my first bricks and mortar business more than twenty years ago. About 5-10 years back, marketing used to revolve around posting flyers through people’s doors and through word and mouth recommendations. However, today, the way to increase sales for businesses today is by engaging and connecting with your customers via social media platforms. You can “tweet” and “post status”. All these stuff were like a foreign language in the past. However, how do you make sure that your efforts on social media pay off?
Below are some tips on how to ensure success and get more sales for your business using social networking sites.
In order to promote your business on Facebook you will need to set up a Facebook business account and profile and invite friends to your page. If you already have a personal Facebook page you can insert your website details within the “about you” section on your personal page. This will offer an ideal way of leading your followers on to your products or business page.
You will then need to choose a name for your business page that will reflect your business, ensuring not to use too many generic keywords like” make money from home”. You can use company overview, description, and mission boxes to provide useful text about your business, including relevant keywords. You also get the opportunity to provide details about yourself in the “bio” section.
The “about you” tab has a maximum of 250 characters with the first 77 being visible to your customers. So make sure that you provide your URL website details within the first 20 characters.
Other tips on ensuring success on Facebook include indexing your photographs with good keywords and to link your Facebook business page to all of your other sites including your blogs, website and other social media sites.
Facebook offers a very powerful way of marketing your business for free, especially for those with bricks and mortar businesses, as it offers a great way to increase revenue by providing details of any last minute offers or promotions that you may have e.g. a restaurant owner could offer a free glass of wine to the first 20 people to book a table that evening.
If you are among octane booster suppliers and operate online, you need to create more interesting and compelling content. As a result, more people will connect with you and give “likes” and ‘shares’ on your posts. More engagement can prove powerful to boost sales of your company.
Twitter, is like a big global chat room whereby people, including celebrities, can choose who they want to chat to. You can either have a global audience or you can select a designated region.
You will need to first of all choose a Twitter username which is restricted to 15 characters. Again you will need to choose a recognizable name for your business.
Twitter restricts you to 140 characters. Tweets with a combination of humor, compelling information and a call to action for your business attracts more visitors to your website.
Your success on Twitter, as with all other social media sites, relies on providing consistent and good content, ideally within 5-7 tweets a day to engage with your followers. You will need to ensure that you do not constantly try to hard sell within your tweets as people generally come on to Twitter to socialise and not to buy anything.
When you do refer to your business within a tweet there is a facility to use a hash tag to highlight any keywords that you may want to use. This is particularly useful for any “shout outs” whereby you share with others information regarding any pending activities.
To ensure that you connect with your followers it is recommended that you retweet other people’s content and that you always reply to any comments that they have made regarding your tweets.
Engaging with your followers on Twitter will help you to build up trust with them which will then lead to them wanting to know more about you and your business and will ultimately result in you being able to make more money for your business.
Pinterest is relatively new and is a fun way to promote your business. Users create boards that are put into different categories e.g. social and fun or business ideas.
You can then “re-pin” an existing pin (image) on to your board or you can download a pin of your own. You then have the facility to type in some text (including your website details), relating to the pin which will then be displayed for others to view and comment on. This is a fun way to promote your business for free and to increase income at the same time.
Pinterest also allows you to sell products within your boards as well as providing good content that can be used on your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Conclusion
All in all, social media offers a powerful way to increase sales for your business. However in order to be successful you will need to be consistent by providing good and varied content daily. You will need to keep all of your URLs the same wherever possible and also ensure that you engage with others by always replying to comments made by your followers. Following this advice will help to ensure success and to increase profits for your business.