Social Media
You have probably heard of social media. In fact, you probably have at least one profile on a social media website. Most of us do. However, have you ever considered how you can use social media to increase your online business success? If you haven’t, you need to, and this page will help get you started.
There are three main ways that the proper use of social media can help your professional website succeed:
• General marketing
• Niche marketing
• Building links.
Marketing your Website with Social Media
Keeping in mind that marketing is different than sales in that marketing’s purpose is to build awareness of your site, as opposed to sales, which is meant to sell services and products, brings some clarity as to how you can use social media to market your website. Most social media sites are free to join. Five of the most popular are:
Facebook
Facebook is the largest and most-well known of the social media websites. It is accessible worldwide, has millions of users and has professional pages along with personal pages. It is free to join.
Twitter
You can also sign up for Twitter for free. It allows you to send out updates about your websites and your products and services in short messages called microblogs. These tweets can include links to your website.
Linkedin
Although similar to Facebook, Linkedin is a social networking site that is geared towards to professionals and business owners. It is probably the top choice for professional networking.
Ning
Ning gives you the power to create your own social networks and join other networks that were created by other users. Once you have a network created and you’ve joined one or two others, it is a nice way to share information about your business.
Tagged
Though about 80% of Tagged users are also on Facebook, the fact that it has more than 100 million registered users means that you should also have a Tagged profile.
Due to the prevalence of social marketing (many people walk around connected to their social media profiles at all times), you need to make sure that you and/or your website has a profile on each of these network marketing websites once your website is up and running. Then, each time you have news to announce such as a sale, new article, service or product, you can mention it on these sites.
Niche Marketing with Social Media
Besides being free, perhaps the greatest strength to social media marketing is that it allows you to reach your target audience. For example, when you sign up for Ning, you will be walked through a series of questions that will connect you with people who are interested in the business that you are in. This is the same type of focused, niche marketing you can also do with other social marketing sites with a bit of effort and time.
Building Links with Social Media
One of the ways that search engines evaluate the value of your website is by the number of links there are pointing back to your website. This is something that your social media campaign can really help you with since all of your profiles will be linked back to your website along with all of your tweets and other announcements. Over time, this will lead to the building of thousands of quality links for you and website. This is absolutely golden to search engines.
Performing Social Media Work: DIY or Outsourcing
There are two basic ways to have your social media work done: you can do it yourself, or you can outsource the work. Doing it yourself is not too tough or time consuming. Except for twitter, which should be used throughout each day, you do not need to post new information on your profiles more than a few times a week.
However, for many, even this amount of work eats into time that needs to be dedicated to other tasks. For these people, outsourcing the work is the way to go. These days outsourcing this type of work is easier than it has ever been before with the use of websites such as Elance.com and Odesk.com. You will find that you can have quality work done with these sites at very competitive prices.
