Your business niche could be almost anything. Mine is professional photography. As a professional photographer focused on photography for websites, I need to reach my clients in a cost effective format. For today and the next few years social media is that format.
- Provide Quality Content
- Invite Guest To Post
- Don't Sell, Teach
If you have bundled Twitter in your marketing plan, make sure your tweets are valuable, relevant and vary in content. Send tweets that contain recommendations and informative comments that are focused on your business. Your followers are more likely to keep interest in your content when you mix these tweets in conjunction with ones that you use to promote your products and services. Because photography is image based, I include images or links to photos in all my tweets.
If you are using social media to it's full potential you will want to advertise by inviting all the people you know to those pages. What if they have no real interest in making a purchase from you? That's fine. You won't have to worry about this aspect when using social media. As long as they're inside of your network, your business will be seen on their pages. So you will get more views from others you have no contact with. This way you and your business get in front of other clients that are not in your group of friends. Marketing on social media is not about selling, it's about being seen as a source of quality information.
Be sure to hotlink all of your social media sites to to all marketing efforts for the best results. Include links if you have a blog where your consumers can see you on Twitter, YouTube and also if they want to like you at Facebook. Add your blog address and Facebook link to your Twitter account. Linking all of your social media profiles together maximizes your revenue-generating potential by converting new customers. Don't forget to have your image with the post. Add it to your Google Plus blog
To make sure your social marketing ad is reaching your customers, find out where they congregate. Are many of them on Facebook or do they prefer Twitter? Depending on your niche, you might be better off looking at LinkedIn or even YouTube. LinkedIn is good for business owners in the market for services. Ask your customers and find out where they spend their internet hours. Pitch your tent there. For photographers, YouTube is a must. It is the second largest search engine next to Google and can get your work seen by thousands.
Social media is a great tool to build trust and relationships with your customers. When promoting your business online you need to do it in an educational format, not in a buy this today approach.
You can get your by posting every couple of days or at least one time a week. For instance, try coming with a list of top 10 tips or writing questions and answers. For photographers, the visual aspect of your article will make it more appealing and your readers will be more likely to share it.
You should find several different methods to interact on a personal, as well as professional, level. For example, respond to other users' notes, statuses, images and updates by [placing one of your own. Be sure to keep any conversations that you do have professional and pertaining to your business.
Things move very fast in social media, and your company will have to adapt quickly to the changes as they come. Just, a few years ago, tablet computers and smart phones did not exist in a mass-produced and publicly available form. Keep an eye on the new technology so that you are better prepared for the changes to your marketing.
If you are going to use a blogging service, try getting as many followers as possible. Interacting with people and responding to comments using a blogging service is much harder when compared to using social networking websites, mostly due to the number of updates that blogging services use as part of their system.
Now that you have gained a better understanding of social media marketing, you can begin to make it a part of your marketing plan. These suggestions are certain to help you keep up with social marketing.
For my niche I focus on FaceBook, YouTube and Pintrest. These are great for any full time professional photographer because they are image intense. An example of using YouTube can be seen in my attached video. It is about how my photography clients use images on business cards.
