Everyone knows about the growth of social media in your personal life, if you are on Facebook or twitter you can keep up to date with what is going on friends and families lives by just checking status updates. You can follow the personal lives of celebrities or sports personalities on twitter and join groups and find like-minded people on Facebook. Google+ now allows you to divide up friends and family using circles and just update to one area
With the growth of social media over the past few years, it’s hardly surprising that businesses are questioning how they can apply the use of social marketing to their business. The applications themselves have responded to this demand by producing areas of the sites particularly for businesses and brands.
Facebook now has a particularly strong business presence. As a start you can produce a page about your business. The Facebook business page allows you to post pictures, information about your business and allows you to have a wall to interact with your customers. Businesses can take advantage of this outlet by producing offers especially for Facebook users, allowing customers to contact them with customer support issues and generally interacting with customers in a way that isn’t possible on most websites. This use of Facebook allows customers to see the organisation as approachable and can create trust in the brand or company. A company with regular postings and offers and a link from their website will soon grow their likes. Formally it was a quest to grow fans but as the like button has gained popularity the key now is to get users to like your page.
After adding a page to Facebook there are other avenues you can explore on Facebook to promote traffic to your site. Facebook has its own version of Facebook Ads that appear when you are logged into Facebook. Facebook ads are demographically targeted so if you’ve just announced you are engaged, adverts will appear advertising wedding information, same if you have an interest in fashion listed ads will be targeted to your interests. As users enter their date of birth and where they live ads can also be targeted on age and location. Adding Facebook ads to your site can help build a community around your website started by your Facebook page. The reach of Facebook ads isn’t yet as great as google adwords but it’s definitely worth trying. You can start by setting a small daily budget and just trialling a few ads; you can choose to pay per impression or per click.
Pages and ads now have Facebook insights, a form of analytics so you can check how well your Facebook campaign is progressing.
While Twitter doesn’t have the business applications specifically built for it like Facebook, any business can set up a twitter page. Then link to it from your website, it can be a quick way of keeping customers up to date with offers and new items on your website as well as a useful communication tool as it’s easy to check twitter and update twitter from most mobiles as its accessible using sms.
Another less direct method of using social media is putting links to it on your website. All major social networks have a way of sharing your content with others on your network of choice.
By adding the Facebook like button to your website, including products, users can share with other the products on your website or just the fact they have found your website, if they are already are logged into Facebook, it’s a simple click and your website has been shared with that users friends. Twitter have a useful button of tweet this to allow users to share what they are looking at with followers and the newest member of the social media family Google, have the plus one button to allow content to be shared with other members on Google+.
However you want to market your website, we recommend you consider social media as an aspect of your online marketing.