Social Media Marketing

If asked, most business owners would say that “word of mouth” is the most effective form of advertising. Think about it. If someone receives good service from your company they are likely to tell friends about it.

This is priceless from a business owners perspective. Your customers are doing the hard work for you. People believe their friends a lot more than they believe ANY form of marketing.

This is where social media comes in.

Websites such as Facebook and Twitter are places where we connect with our friends, share photos and talk about everything we have been up to. This includes if we had a lovely meal at that new restaurant, if we made a new purchase or if we recieved great service from a local business.

Now this is where things get interesting from a marketing perspective.

Your online presence HAS to include social media for many reasons, some of which include:

• You receive high quality backlinks to your website which helps it rank higher on Google
• You receive targeted traffic (visitors) to your website
• There is an opportunity for people to talk about your business (Word of Mouth )
• You can start to build a list of people who you can communicate to over and over again
• People spend hours on these sites EVERY DAY, even on mobile phones whilst they are working!

However there is another side to social media that catches many business owners out.

Social media should NEVER be used as a platform for posting adverts. Social media is all about developing relationships with people. And trust me, it’s just as easy to have bad publicity spread around the social networks if you are seen to be a spammer by the communities. I have seen it happen many times.

If you look at the graph to the right (from alexa.com sep 2011) you can see the reach that the main social media sites have. Most people think that Google is the only place to be if you want to increase your profits and brand awareness but as you can see, they are not the only players.

Your overall marketing strategy should make things easy for people to share information about your business across the main social media sites and the best way to do this is to have a customised profile on each of them.

Your website should also be the connecting hub between all your different social media accounts.

Contact us now to find out how we can help you integrate social media into your overall marketing plan so you can start benefitting from the word of mouth marketing that we all crave so much.

And whilst you are here, you might as well watch this quick video