Social media business starts with making the decision to be part of the conversation. Not that easy or cut and dried a decision as you may think. What are the factors involved in this process? The pros and cons?
Benefits of Social Media for Business
* Potential to raise website page rank
* Potential to find new customers or clients
* Potential to make new business connections
* Potential to reach current customer base with new products or services,start conversations
* Potential to get customers talking about me or my company
* Potential to find out what you are not offering to your customers that they want-as they will tell you 🙂
* Potential to have your PR department consisting of your customers
* Potential to get great reviews from happy customers- pls note it can also backfire
* Potential to feel important because you have followers!
Cons of Social Media for Business
* Time consuming
* Energy consuming
* Internal Resource consuming
* Costly if not done correctly
* Don’t know what to say
* Don’t know where to start
* Don’t have any customers or clients to help you get started
The current trend in search engines is to use tweets and status updates, SMM shares and reviews about you or your website as a piece of how they rank your site. So for no other reason, because of this you need to have at least a minimal social media presence. Facebook Business Page, Twitter account, Linked In, Yelp, Google Places and a YouTube channel. There are over 350 social media sites out there, but these are the 6 you should start with. Privacy is always a concern, but you control what is seen and accessed, not visitors. Google and Bing utilize the share button as a strong indicator that people view you or your site as an authoritative site. Sharing is the highest form of social media flattery followed closely by reviews and links.
Don’t get lost in the hype over how well social media helps big business. Big business throws hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars into their PR campaigns of which social media is a part. You don’t have that kind of budget and therefore all the great white papers on and case studies of big business success in social media just doesn’t apply to you. Focus instead on what you can do locally to effect a positive return on investment for your marketing (ROI).
Local Social Media is a task that can consume time and energy of small business owners and be a drain on their budgets if not managed well. Just like any other small business task, managing is the key to success. So manage it, don’t let it manage you. Find a partner like The Website Marketing Group (TWMG) that will save you and make you money.
Start with picking someone in your company who will handle the day-to-day social media activities, who will spend 15 minutes every day to either tweet something on Twitter, or re tweet something, post a status update on Facebook or check the insights and activity. It doesn’t have to be you, the business owner. We recommend to clients that they have someone else do the basics and leave the relationship building to themselves. Once you have established who, decide when. Facebook marketers are notorious for posting multiple times a day and losing their audience. Twitter feeds can and often are more than once a day without being annoying, while LinkedIn may be once a week or even every month.
Contact us today at The Website Marketing Group to help you with your Social Media Strategy.
Visit http://www.twmg.com.au/social-media-marketing-services-sydney.html