Using social bookmarks to promote startups
What social media participation achieves for companies
Social media, in essence, is related to engagement through sharing, which for companies means targeting their product range, their items, or their services to engage a potential customer or customer base. Collectively, products, services and articles are known as content, and it is through the supply of quality content that success can be achieved through your channels. Social marketing has around 900 million users worldwide and covers every topic you can think of. In addition to engaging a potential customer and a customer or reader base, social media is also relevant for search engine optimization. Social media is a unique format as it helps you promote your content to your audience, and in turn generates traffic through people sharing your content with others and through SEO. Perhaps more important than this, however, social media with its online reviews helps a business build trust, and almost every brand you can think of uses social media for this reason. Think of this as: you come across two companies offering the same services; one has 250 likes on Facebook, the other 43, which one would you choose? So regardless of whether you are an online retailer, an affiliate marketer, offer a service like tuition, or run a news site, social media can help you build your online business. Google estimates that by 2015, UK consumers will have purchased £ 40 billion worth of products and services online.
Popular social media sites and their uses
Getting familiar with the nuances of the role of social media in promoting your business can cause more than your fair share of headaches. Here is a list of the most popular social media sites and their uses:
Facebook is predominantly for sharing. They can be products, articles or services. Simply put, it is to share your content with as many people as possible.
Twitter is about sharing news on any topic. Don’t let the word news make you feel like it doesn’t apply to products. New product launches, new stock ready to sell – Twitter is good for all of this.
Google+ is partly a combination of the two and has become important for search engine optimization, at least.
Blogs are a great way to impart news and expertise to your readers, clients, and customer or supporter base. It offers a good way to attract visitors to your site through search engines.
YouTube is all about showing videos to a wide audience. Businesses use it all the time to sell products and services. Since YouTube is owned by search engines, videos tend to rank high in search engine results. You can also use YouTube ads to generate a secondary income stream.
Pinter est and other bookmarking sites are great for displaying visual products. If your business sells something online, even a product or service, be sure to post on Pinter est and all the bookmarking sites you can find.
Search engine optimization and social media (SEO)
Good search engine rankings are all about unique quality content that is well shared and well linked from other websites. By sharing your content on social sites, there are more chances that people will like you on Facebook, re-tweet with Twitter, or share the pin on Pinter est. Links are important for good SEO and posting your content on social sites provides a link from the social site to yours, and in all cases you can be directed to a specific web page. By website I mean a specific solution, service or item. This also ensures that the web page is indexed by Google. That is, you add it to your database, ensuring that it can be found in search engines.
Finding the best social media sites for your business
To find the best social sites that suit your business, think about what your business is trying to do. If your business sells products or services, use social sites that feature images and videos to sell the product. YouTube, Pinter est, Delicious, and Instagram are great for showcasing products. If you are in the sales game, make videos of your products, take good professional photos and find them on these sites, and be sure to link the images and videos directly to the content on your site. If you sell on eBay or an affiliate seller, try to link directly to the product page where a potential customer can buy it. Also, put the products on your Facebook page or my space, Google+ page and Twitter. For service providers, a slightly different spin on social media promotion is needed as most of the time a service provider will sit in the middle of visual social media and text-based social sites . This also applies to affiliate marketers. If you can, represent your services that have an image or icon, and post the image or icon on visual sites. Use videos to show your services; if you can get customer testimonials, well that’s gold dust. Regularly blog and tweet the articles, along with industry information. This commitment will help build trust with all of your existing clients, showcase your skills, and help people who want to become new clients find you.
Social media advertising
If you have the budget for it, Facebook offers one-click advertising, like Google Ad Sense, or it can be used to earn likes. Often it is in cases of experimentation. For affiliate marketing revenue streams, the click will expose the user to your revenue stream, while a Like will ensure that every time a new article or product is posted, you are informed. It’s trial and error and it seems to work well for some companies, but others have lost faith.
Saving time
By now, you’ve probably guessed that updating social sites, especially if you post a large amount of content daily, is hard work. Larger companies employ people to keep up, something many startups don’t have the budget or time for. You can help automate the updating of your social accounts using auto-syndication sites.
A social media strategy
Step 1: Create a Facebook Page, Twitter Account, and Google+ Business Page
These have their uses regardless of the type of business and all help considerably with SEO. Make sure to create business pages on Facebook in addition to Google+. This keeps your personal data and indeed life on social media hidden from your customers or clients, and offers better options for promoting a business.
Step 2: Identify the Social Media Sites that Are Most Important to Your Business
If your site sells products, make a list of all the online video and bookmarking sites you could find and create accounts. Make sure to use Pinter est and YouTube. If your business is for services, information, or an affiliate marketing income stream, you want to get the word out in as many ways as possible. Use blogging sites like Tumble, Blogger, and WordPress. org to distribute your sites and services, and try to create news content if you provide services to showcase your expertise in your field.
Step 3: use social media tools like ‘If this, then that’
‘If this, then that’ or ifttt.com automatically updates your social accounts. This is easy to set up and works by spreading the information across a large number of social sites automatically as soon as a site is updated. This, as you can imagine, saves a lot of time. However, be careful to make sure that business-appropriate social sites, such as bookmarking sites for online retailers, appear exactly as you want them to be. Auto syndication has limitations, and links and images often do not appear the way you would like. However, and especially to distribute blog posts via RSS feed, it is a very good time saver to promote your business via social media. Not all social networks can be distributed in this way, but it is worth creating accounts on the sites that the unions commit to to promote your business. The more social media sites you post, the better.
Step 4: use #hashtags
Whenever you post your content, be sure to use appropriate #hashtags. This will help users find your content when they search for it. So if I sell tires on eBay, #tires, #cartyres, #car, #treys is good, and for sports news, # sports news, # football #cricket etc it is good.
Step 5: once it starts
Once your content starts to reach the web 2. 0 world, check your accounts for feedback. Focus on the sites that you have identified as important to your business and respond to questions and comments. When responding, try to be helpful and not abusive, even if the commenter is not pleasant. Professionalism goes the way.
Step 6: participation
Twitter and Google+ show trending topics and these include popular topics that people are discussing. It’s worth doing the odd Twitter search to see what people are talking about in relation to your business and to contribute to the discussion. This is a great way to make connections and hopefully be more successful.
Step 7: Monitoring Success
Tracking success has been confirmed to be quite difficult for social media. Unlike SEO results, which can be measured based on clicks and content engagement, it’s not that simple on social sites for a variety of reasons. If you provide news, you may feel that 10 comments on a story is a good sign of success, while 100 likes of a product video on YouTube without an obvious link to sales are probably not immediately obvious as positives. However, it is worth remembering that while people may not go directly to your main site through social sites, they may be prompted to return later. Always keep in mind that social media is for sharing content, so any likes, comments, or re tweets are positive.