Tag Archives: Twitter

5 Social Media Tips to Help Promote Your New Business

As we blast into the age of digital marketing, new businesses have a lot to learn. While traditional marketing tactics still have their place, it’s not nearly enough to propel a new business into the limelight. There is much more that has to be done, and it starts with social media.

Why Social Media?

With the growing popularity of social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, businesses have picked up on the trend. Creating a profile and actively engaging in these sites provide a great way for new businesses to get in touch with their customers and build a digital following. It can also help build up your brand and establish instant feedback and a deeper customer connection, too.

You Have to Have a Plan

If you want to stand a chance in this world, you need to put together a solid digital marketing plan. What if you don’t have one? Don’t worry – it’s actually easy to get everything pieced together once you know how social media works.

To help you get started, take a look at the 5 social media tips below. Pay attention to each one, as they can make the difference between your business taking off or watching it fall flat on its face!

Tip #1 – Study Other Businesses and How They Use Social Media

Before you think about hopping on the social media train, it’s best to see how others are capitalizing on it. Take a look at any large, successful business and take notes. Make sure to look at things like:

  • How they setup their profiles on each platform
  • How they interact with their customers
  • What type of marketing tactics they use (and what garners the most response)

By looking closely at businesses that are successfully using social media to enhance their image and increase their brand awareness, you will be able to use it to your advantage. It’s a necessary process and one that will help you formulate your own plan for success!

Tip #2 – Only Use the Platforms You Plan to Update Frequently

One of the biggest mistakes a new business can make with social media is to spread themselves too thin. They often do this by creating profiles on a variety of platforms without capitalizing on each one (or understanding how they work). Eventually, they forget about certain profiles, which can lead to dormancy (i.e. accounts that are unused or have low-activity). When this happens, it can put a stain on your efforts.

How can you cure this problem? The solution is simple. Only stay active on the sites that you plan to use and keep updated on a regular basis. Anything less will make your brand appear less established and can give off bad vibes, which may send potential customers running for the hills.

Tip #3 – Reach Out and Connect With Your Audience5 social media tips to help promote your new business

The fastest way to success with social media is to interact with your audience. The more you can make a prospect feel closer to your business, the better your chances are of turning them into a long-term customer.

Connect with your audience and talk to them. Ask them plenty of questions that will make them respond. Make it about them, not you. The more interaction and influence you have, the easier it will be for you to get results and build a large following!

Tip #4 – Don’t Make it All About You

No one likes a business that stays in promotion mode 100% of the time. While you should always aim to keep it professional, don’t be afraid to have a little fun with it! Post content that your target market can relate to. Get creative and find ways to incorporate your business into it in some way. As long as you don’t come off as overly promotional, people will appreciate you more for it.

Tip #5 – Let Your Followers Get Involved

People participate in social media because of the interaction. To increase your customer interaction and gain more followers, you need to find ways for your target market to get involved.

How can you do it? Here are a few quick and easy options:

  • Hold unique contests that both promote your business and encourage people to get involved.
  • Don’t hold back when asking customers to share your content. Create the kind of stuff that make people want to share it. It’s the best way to make something go viral, which can explode your following.
  • Tell your customers you want to hear from them, and make it easy for them to access you. People are much more likely to get involved when they know their efforts will be reciprocated.

These marketing tactics are easy to implement, yet they will go far in helping you build your business through social media.  Give them a shot and see what they can do for you!

Become a Social Media Maestro Today

Depending on what type of business you operate, choosing to skip out on social media may not hurt it, but it definitely won’t help anything. As long as you start small and slowly get the hang of it, you will quickly see how much of an impact it can have when everything comes together. The opportunity to reach more customers is there. All you have to do is capitalize on it. The rest, as they say, is history!

The Hashtag: Pervasive, Powerful and Indispensable

The “hashtag” is a powerful tool that originated on Twitter and has since spread to other social media sites. At its most basic, the hashtag is a word or group of words that follows the pound sign and is used to assign messages to a particular topic. Casual users utilize hashtags to organize their messages and make them searchable under a given search term. Internet marketers can use them to solidify their online presence and increase brand awareness, although many marketers remain ignorant of the power of this tool.

The surface-level benefits of hashtags are many and immediate. Most importantly, placing a hashtag within a tweet makes it visible to anyone searching for that hashtag. Furthermore, when other users click on the hashtag, they are taken to a list of all other tweets that contain it. This makes it easy for users to organize their tweets under a single banner, making their message more memorable to other Twitter members. Twitter users can place a hashtag anywhere within a tweet.

Internet marketers are well advised to embrace hashtag technology. Awareness of the hashtag and the power that it represents is increasing. During the 2013 Super Bowl, for instance, 38% of advertisements contained hashtags. If a marketer is not using hashtags, the chances are good that their competitors are. Additionally, other social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and Tumblr have adopted it. Functionality of the tool remains largely the same across platforms.

Hashtag usage still occurs most often on Twitter, and full-scale adoption on social network Facebook has been slow. However, many Internet marketers anticipate Facebook adoption to increase rapidly as casual users learn of the benefits of the tool. Twitter marketers can search for a hashtag to use on hashtag.org. Anyone can use a hashtag, and there is no need to register one before use. Consequently, marketers are encouraged to create a hashtag that is both relevant to their brand and not in use. Facebook users can look for any hashtag using the site’s search functionality found at the top of almost every page.The Hashtag Pervasive, Powerful and Indispensable

Marketers wishing to take advantage of this powerful tool should ensure that they are using the same hashtag on Twitter and other social media platforms. Using multiple hashtags confuses fans and reduces brand recognition. A single hashtag also allows marketers to gain a clear bird’s-eye view of all the discussion concerning their brand.

To begin working toward hashtag cohesion, marketers are advised to use the same hashtag on their tweets or posts for several weeks. During this time, it is likely that fans will pick up on this gentle prompting and follow suit. To further raise awareness of their brand, marketers can use their new hashtag in a promotional campaign. Promotions, whether on Twitter, Facebook or any other channel create heightened awareness of the pertinent brand for their duration. Facebook has dropped their requirement that contests be run through dedicated apps, making it easier than ever to run promotions.

To take advantage of trending topics or fads—and the traffic they generate—marketers can simply identify the hashtag associated with the event and use it in a tweet, along with their own hashtag. This tactic results in their hashtag showing up in the more popular hashtag’s tweet thread. It is important, however, that users integrate the trending hashtag into their tweets in a natural way.

Once users gain basic proficiency with hashtags, they should branch out into wider tags. This tactic may be especially effective on Facebook or anywhere else where many people are posting to a general yet popular hashtag, such as “#summer,” “#baseball,” or “#fastfood.” Users can simply integrate the wider hashtag naturally into a tweet or post that contains their own hashtag. This is an excellent way to reach new fans and customers. All Internet marketers are encouraged to take full use of hashtags. They provide an efficient manner to reach new leads and keep customers engaged.

How IT Consulting Can Help Leverage Your Social Media Presence

Social media promotion is fast becoming one of the most effective ways to improve sales and connect with customers.  Using online services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg, companies are able to create buzz, boost customer traffic to their main corporate websites, generate leads for new customers, and build brand awareness.  All of this increases the return on the investment enterprises have made in their IT staffing and infrastructure, but many companies look at the new world of social media and wonder exactly where to begin the process of social media optimization (SMO) and social media marketing (SMM).

how-it-consulting-can-help-leverage-your-social-media-presenceNot every enterprise, after all, already possesses an IT services and support staff thoroughly conversant in the ways these web-based platforms can function as business tools.

Fortunately, a solution exists in the form of IT consultants who can come on board an enterprise for the short or long term.  If they assist for only a short time, their role will be to teach existing IT personnel how to establish a corporate social media presence and leverage it to increase profitability.  This is a good solution for some enterprises, but in others, current IT staffs already are already completely booked seeing to in-house software and hardware needs.

In this case, it may be better to contract with IT consultants for the long term so they can directly manage an enterprise’s social media presence within the parameters given to them by upper management.  This process will involve a dialogue between the consultants and enterprise management, leading to increased understanding of SMM and SMO on the part of the enterprise.