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Friday, November 16, 2012

Social Media Marketing Tips, Tricks, and Pointers

By Marcie Nish

If your business is still using tried and true marketing techniques, you will fall behind the competition. Social media marketing provides the newest way to promote your products and services, but you have to have knowledge about how to do it to be successful. This article contains some great hints on how you can make social media marketing work for you.

Add comments, ratings and other tools for a friendly, easy to use website. When you add these things, your customers will be able to find content they are looking for, which will keep them around.

Try getting more followers on your social media by offering special coupons and discounts with those that like or follow your page. Your customers will enjoy the sense of exclusivity when they receive these special discounts, and you will likely see your profits swell as you land more sales.

Try focusing your campaign on popular social outlets. Make sure that you have a profile on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. When you focus your resources and create a more tailored campaign, you have a better chance of increasing your sales and business.

Although you want to keep an active social media presence, you do not need to post hundreds of updates a week. Social media is about communication; your posts should help you connect and communicate with customers rather than just informing them of what you are up to because that does not help them at all.

Your business should have its own Twitter and Facebook accounts. That will secure the name for you alone, so that no one else can use it for purposes that might harm your business. Even if you are far from actively employing the account, you will have staked your claim to your name.

Check out the pages of those in your industry who are most highly sought after to obtain an idea of why they are popular. What kind of content do they share? How do they format their pages? Use these pages as a guideline when putting together your own, while looking for ways to set your page apart from everything out there.

Never get careless when putting out new information. On social media sites, you may feel inclined to post as fast as you can. However, you have to be aware that errors in grammar, spelling mistakes or falsities cast an unprofessional light on your business. Even though these sites seem informal, you should always stay professional when using them.

Think twice before retaining the services of a social media promotion firm. It is not uncommon for these agencies to use unscrupulous and unfair business practices to cheat business owners of their money. Businesses use myriads of fake social media accounts that they use bots to build. Few real people, if any, will see your spot -- even though your hits are up and you pay through the nose to your marketing company.

Write a guest post on a blog in your niche or allow a guest blogger to post on your blog. This will help you garner more traffic to your own site. If you are ever invited to guest blog somewhere else, make sure you can get a back link out of the deal. Also, let the guest blogger do the same thing. The other blogger's readers are probably going to come and check you out.

Quality content is what will attract visitors to your pages. Create a guide that will explain how to perform a difficult task. You could also provide a well-illustrated and thoughtful product review. When you add in content that is appealing, you have a better chance that people will go ahead, visit, and share your material.

Using YouTube as part of your business's social media marketing strategy can assist you in getting the type of visitors that you want. This helps because visitors will already know what it is you are marketing, because they have already seen your videos. Having visitors to your site who know about your products can help increase your sales.

Observe what works for your competition. Take a good, hard look at their efforts, and see what works for them, and what looks like a bust. Once you find out this information, use it in your social media campaign.

Facebook users can "check in" to physical locations via their mobile phones through the Facebook Places feature. Put up a Facebook account for your business, and then encourage people to "like" your page. If they can prove that they did, give them a discount when they buy something from you. There are many good examples to help you learn more.

Your YouTube videos should be strongly linked to all your other online presences, not only your website. Make sure your channel and your individual videos link to Twitter and Facebook, too. When you get users from YouTube on Twitter and Facebook, you also have more of a chance that they will share any videos you have through these social media sites.

If you put the information, you read in the article above, you will find success with social media marketing. Included are tips that can be at use at any stage in the process, and will prove useful for years to come. Although social media requires time, it is not as complex as it might seem. The reward will be worth the time you invest understanding it.
 
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