Dot-Dash.NET

Using social media correctly and effectively can grow your business and keep you in the forefront of your customers minds soliciting repeat business and referrals. Social media is here to stay and is transforming the way a lot of people do business online

The key is to use it correctly and in a time efficient manner. It’s not hard to sign up to Facebook, Twitter Linkedin and more – join lots of groups and add lots of friends – then start spouting out lots of marketing messages and annoying all your potential customers in the process.

With a bit of creative thought and well spent research however it is possible to build relationships and a following through these online networks. The key concepts are to:

• Be interesting – you have knowledge and experience in your field that your target market can benefit from.
• Be unique – don’t be just another Tweeter broadcasting links to news articles and other people’s blog posts every 5 minutes.
• Know when to pitch and when not to – using social networks to sell directly to cold prospects does not work. The purpose if social networking is to establish and build relationships.
• Get the mix right between other people’s and your own content – when you produce high quality content of your own that other people consider shareable with their networks then you’re getting SMO to work for you.

What Role Does Social Media Play in Your Online Business Activites?

For a lot of people social media is replacing tradition traffic generation methods such as SEO, Pay-Per-Click and article marketing. The advantages SMO has over SEO is that you can reach a lot of people very quickly. As previously stated the purpose of SMO is to establish and develop relationships, this is done in the following way:

You share a piece of relevant, interesting and high quality content with your network. This can be your own or someone else’s. If it is someone else’s then you do this for relationship building so that your followers and friends continue to read your tweets and share your tweets with their list of followers (retweeting).

Then when you produce your own piece of high quality, interesting and relevant content your follower/friend list will hopefully check it out and retweet it to their lists etc etc.

They then arrive at your content site (blog) and read your post. On your blog site you have a large – ‘can’t miss it’ call to action to click through to your company/sales site/page.

If you have built a good relationship with them, shared quality content with them and they like what they see they will now be far more likely to click on that big shiny call to action.

If that call to action is a lead generation action in exchange for a high value freebie (free ebook/download/telephone consultation) then you stand a far higher chance of converting them into leads who are now in your sales funnel for you to follow up.

At this point you now have a warm lead who you have built up a relationship with. Do you think you stand a better chance at a sale than if you just spammed all the social networks with links to your sales page?

It’s a bit of a drawn out process but hey – if it was easy everyone would be doing it right?

So if you are interested in implementing the above process from end to end – or just a part of it please get in touch using my contact page with a brief description of your business and the kind of project you have in mind.