This is a guest post by Ellee Parker of Web Host Gear, a British Columbia, Canada provider of web hosting reviews.
Finding decent web hosting and building a website is only the first step to successful Internet marketing. This isn’t a matter of if you build it they will come; you need to attract customers and potential customers to your site. One of the most efficient and cost effective ways of doing this is with social media.
Internet marketing isn’t like traditional marketing, where you create a series of ads and customers sit in their living rooms and watch them. The new age of marketing is about participative marketing.
You need to engage your customers.
Talk with them instead of at them.
And make them a part of your business.
This is where tools like Facebook and Twitter are useful. Facebook has over 500 million users, 14% of which log on every day. These users not only chat with their friends, they also follow companies. Forty percent of Facebook users follow a brand and of the percentage, 51% of them purchase from the brand they follow. Twitter has 106 million users and 25% of them follow a brand. Of the people who follow a brand on Twitter, 67% of them will purchase that brand.
NICHE MARKETING
There is no other media that allows you the access to that many people, not even television. And it allows for effective niche marketing as well. Users of Twitter and Facebook tell you what they like and who they are right on their main pages. This allows for marketing statistics that are more detailed to ensure that what you believe is your target market really is your target market.
Social media marketing is different than just posting a series of ads. You need to engage followers and fans. People buy from people and social media allows companies to show their human side to their customers. Businesses can also discuss what is going on in the company and what the future holds for the organization. This lets people be aware of changes within your company and makes them feel like they are a part of things.
TEST MARKETING
Test marketing is also effective using social media. Testing new flavors, products, marketing ideas and services with followers and fans gives your company a chance to find out what people may or may not like before millions of dollars are wasted on production and advertising. Sometimes people come up with ideas your organization hasn’t even thought of, opening whole new directions for your business.
SOCIAL MEDIA as a SALES FUNNEL
Social media is also an effective sales funnel. Potential customers have a way to engage with your organization to determine if your company is one they want to do business with. Then, by the time they visit your website, they are ready to buy. This increases the conversion rate on your site and the customers who use this route are more loyal and tend to stay longer.
Customer service is effective when supported with social media services. Many companies use Twitter to speak with unhappy customers and deal with their problem before it escalates. Diffusing a potential issue on social media is very important. The Internet gives even the lowliest customer a megaphone, and people will listen. Dell learned that the hard way when an angry blogger created a negative post and it went viral. Don’t ignore negative comments on social media platforms! They could be your downfall.
SOCIAL MEDIA is a COMMUNITY
Social media is a community and if you form a community with your customers and followers then they will begin to trust you. Web hosting companies often offer social media and search engine optimization services with their hosting packages. This helps you use social media efficiently and effectively to gain and keep customers.
GuestAuthor
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Social media today are very helpful in every way not just for communication…Sometimes, it can help every business grow and bring it to success…That is why even in blogging, they can help as well…
This is a great article. I think the thing is recognizing the best niches that social media will work with. Some niches aren’t as conducive to repeat customers, and therefore building a social media following isn’t really applicable.
Sure Facebook is the biggest site in the world, where people spend the most time, but unless you have 100,000 likes on your Facebook page, you’re probably better focusing on Twitter.
Rowan would love you to read ..The Best Method of Social Media Marketing
Social media networking is so important now, it’s such a huge part of today’s culture. GREAT POST! Very informative and really helps stress how important it is. A lot of places are now stressing the impact social media networking has on one’s business and popularity. keep more articles coming!
Internet is a great tool to make your business successful. Even small businesses need a website for them to get customers not only local but internationally.
Social media has a great impact when it comes to marketing. A lot of people now are using internet especially social networking sites. Like facebook, twitter, google+ and other social networking sites have also great help with marketing.
Great guest post Ellee Parker!
Comprehensive explanation about the use of social media! Very useful.
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The information you have posted here, for me, is a help because I really need it right now…
As businessmen, we all should maximize the use of social networking sites. This article is very informative. Worthy of a repost.
It is extremely important to get to know your customer, their annoyances, loves, needs, problems, and concerns. Many small businesses have no idea who their target customer is or what they’re really looking for and it is their downfall. Learn how to treat them right through social media and the message will go viral, but it also works the other way around. Use it wisely.
Social media will continue to play a big role on the internet for a lot years so anyone who reject social media as a traffic source he will regret it badly
Kostas would love you to read ..Email Marketing And Social Media Explained
Social media is so important for marketing online that I don’t imagine in this days a marketing campaign without social media.
By other side, you are totally right when you say that social media like Facebook and Twitter allows you focus on the target market of your service or product.
thanks for your explanation , very details and im looking forward for another post. because i have been busy in order to make my online store have many visitors day by day~ and this post is smoothly help me
Thank you for all the details you’ve posted. I think Google + will bring a lot of new things to the table. Google has the internet field wrapped around their little finger. There is little that Google touches that doesn’t turn to gold!
Social media is getting popular and wider today all over the country…Thanks for the post…
Some days Facebook gets more traffic than Google, so I think that if you do it right you could definitely get in front of a lot of people. Great post and thanks for reminding me about it!
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>>>Facebook has over 500 million users, 14% of which log on every day.
wow, I’m actually quite surprised by this statistic. A mere 14% of facebook users log in on a daily basis?? I would say that most people I know (myself included) login once a day to check their wall/messages/whatever.
that stat actually made me reconsider how many eyes are really on my posts at any given point on facebook, and how many of my posts will become buried over the next few days or so and most users could miss them!
Hi Greg,
We have to remember that not everyone is as Internet crazy as we are! Hard as it may be to believe when we have been online so long, there are still many people who live local to me who either rarely go online or have never even seen the Internet.
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Social Media can either help you or destroy you, i’ve seen people who abuse it and hurt their business badly. Another tip, don’t use automated softwares that post and tweet certain things, people love interaction.
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I agree with the author about social media. I guess colleges would soon add this to their course structure, or might have done that already. I am still learning about marketing by using social media sites. The only issue is this that twitter and facebook both are giving me almost opposite results! I cannot make any conclusions. Either I should merge both the opinions and then conclude or give away one of the sites!
nice post for the beginners like me.. I got lot of information about social media and surely will follow the above said steps.. thanks for sharing 😀
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Hi prakash,
You’re apparently doing pretty good for a beginner. Your PeerIndex rating is already 34.
growmap would love you to read ..Social Media and Increasing Website Traffic
It does depend on your niche but we find you might still want to test it out before not having a social network at all. Now, it does help out some niches more than others but I feel you still have to keep up with social networks to stay relevant.
Social Media is a great help to establish and spread your business online. Some are saying social sites is not useful but I think it depends how you
make a connection to social sites member. I believe social sites are very
useful.
I believe that social media is very important today. People are living with great technology and I don’t think that they didn’t know what are social media all about. Almost businesses are running online.
Social media is where it is at and advertising there is a must. I agree with you that you do have to take a different approach than with traditional advertising and this is where a lot of people fall down – they forget that social media is just that – social! So, you must engage with your audience, not just hit them with ads. Will take a further look at your points to decide on some action points of my own. Thanks!!
Social media is here to stay. It’s definitely something that you can use to promote your site/product, however, you need to be sure that it’s valuable information that you are providing. There are so many privacy options with social media these days that if you are not providing valuable content, you won’t get followers.
Using social networking to promote business can be tricky. I know for some people the advertisements or spammy posts from brands you like is the equivalent to having a salesman come to your door or telemarketers constantly annoying you. It can easily be a turn off. There is a right way and a wrong way.
Social media is great but most companies leave out the social part when creating their program. I see so many start up programs then just spam their links and wonder why their program is not succeeding. I even have clients that I set up programs for that have no idea how to communicate with their clients….lets put the social back in social media
Social media is so important these days. Besides being a way to get involved in a community and even establishing your own, recent connections between social media and SEO have made synergy between the two entirely necessary as well.
It’s definitely useful to have twitter and facebook accounts for certain businesses, but not all will benefit in the same ways. A carpet cleaning company is not going to benefit as much as, say, a restaurant or bar. I think it favors companies that tend to build a loyal base of repeat customers.
Social media is a bugger to get a quick and/or good return on. Yes, it’s cheap and with a lot of effort it can pay off, but it takes real work and real interactions to really be effective. I’m not encouraging taking shortcuts or avoiding it, but social media shouldn’t be your entire marketing strategy or utilize the majority of your time either.
Best of luck w/ your endeavors.
We can use social media to promote our products or services. If we can use it properly, they can drive sell. But today, many people use it as spam and i think they will make social media sites have a bad name.
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It seems that big companies really take social marketing seriously now. As you say, it is something they ignore at their peril. This is a good lesson for every level of business from the largest to the smallest. A successful social campaign can do wonders in both the short-term and long-term.
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I haven’t used social sites from a long time and now i missing its features. Thanks to remind me.
Hello,
Love this site, I’ve learned something about this topic…
You really stressed a good point there. Social Media allows you to share and reach millions of people on the net. And its quite really cost efficient and effective way to do some marketing approach.
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Social media is here to stay. There’s definitely a link between the growing trend of internet marketing and social media. And now as facebook and other medias have “pages” it’s getting eve more involved.
I agree! the coming of Google+ has really brought forward many new options for people to increase the effectiveness of their Social Marketing strategies, and I guess the upcoming time might open a whole new world of possibilities.
also with the new release of google+ and circles this will start to make major effect to all areas of internet marketing
I wouldn’t be too sure of that Dante, there have been recent reports of Google shutting down all corporate Google Plus profiles. Apparently they’re planning to incorporate social marketing for businesses into the platform at a later date, but as things stand right now only private individuals, and not brands, are allowed on Google Plus.
This is the first time I’m hearing about this. So Google+ does not allow “professional” profiles? Well, you can’t do that on Facebook either, but you’re discouraged from doing that on FB simply because FB is FB. No one’s going to take you there seriously. But here I was thinking Google+ was going to be different…