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6 Simple Steps To Grow Social Media Presence

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6 SIMPLE WAYS TO SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE GROWTH

These social media giants; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and Pinterest have over 2 billion users collectively. As such, they’ve become the perfect platforms for marketing products and services. Brands and businesses realized that people cherish personal experiences. And social media provided an excellent environment for creating these personal relationships with the customers. However, growing a robust social media presence can be quite a daunting task if you don’t possess fundamental social skills.

social mediaHere are a few simple ways to increase your social media presence.

1. Know your audience and identify when they’re most active.

You must first seek to engage your followers regularly. And you can only do that if you know as much as you can about them. You can then use what you’ve learnt to create a more engaging and personal experience with your fans.

You should also find out when your audience is most active. You can then know the best times to interact with them. There are various tools to use to determine when your audience is online i.e. Tweriod (for Twitter) and the ‘insights’ section of the Facebook dashboard.

2. Try to help people rather than just selling to them.

People will naturally gravitate toward things or individuals who add value to their lives. If you concentrate on providing value to people, they’ll instinctively seek to provide some form of value to you too. You won’t have to woo them to buy your products, because they’ll have already cultivated trust in you.

3. Expand Your Social Media Presences – Go visual.

Research by the Buffer-app found that Tweets with images receive up to 150% more retweets. Visuals easily capture peoples attention and also add to the essence of the message. Thanks to free tools like Canva, you could easily overlay text onto images or create unique graphics to share with your fans. Alternatively, you could create engaging videos or vines for your followers.

4. Provide Q and A’s On Social

Your fans need to feel a human connection with you. By regularly providing Q and A’s, your audience gets an opportunity to learn more about the person behind the screen.

5. Promote social media contests.

Social media contests are an awesome way to engage and reward your followers. You can reward your fans for following, and sharing or liking your posts.

6. Monitor your social media presence progress and find what methods work best.

Testing new ways of engaging your audience should be at the top of your priority list. However, you should observe which methods work best and use them more, while ridding those methods that do not work as well.

To truly supercharge your social media presence, you need to be consistent in your posting schedule i.e. try to engage your audience on a nearly daily basis with interesting quality content of all types.

Importance of social media for small business

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The Value Of Small Business Social Media

Now, when running a business, one must have a solid and reliable online presence. With a website, SEO strategy, and social media accounts, a company can reach more customers and make more money. With that being said, many do not know enough about social media and they end up missing out on opportunities. Fortunately, with this quick guide, one can understand why social media for small business is beneficial.

What Social Media Applications Are Great For Small Business?

What: when thinking about social media, most think of Facebook and Twitter. These are, by far, the two largest outlets and the ones most people should concern themselves with. Now, this does not mean that social media for small business is simple. Instead, when setting up accounts, one should take the time to fill out their profile and make plenty of posts. At the same time, a business owner must communicate with visitors as this is the best way for a business to gain market share.

Many small business owners do not feel that they need social media marketing. Whether a person runs a one-man show or has 50 employees, they must use social media. When using this outlet, one can reach out to customers of all income brackets and ages. Remember, almost everyone heads online and visits social media pages every day.

Why many entrepreneurs do not think they need Facebook as they are satisfied with their current marketing plan. While some people do well with advertisements and referrals, social media helps. In fact, most will see the benefits quickly as they will see a spike in website traffic. Not only that, when using social media marketing, an entrepreneur will see that he or she will not need to spend a lot of money to find customers. This is a serious advantage for a small business owner who does not have a large marketing budget. Simply put, dollar for dollar, social media is a reliable way to bring in customers and increase sales.

Fortunately, even a person with limited computer or Internet experience can set up a social media account. When signing up for an account, a business owner must provide basic information about the business. Once established, the business should have no difficulty in finding followers for the page.

Social Media Networking For Online Marketing

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SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR INTERNET MARKETING

Social media networking sites (such as Twitter, FaceBook, and Google+) allow Internet users to form communities online quickly and easily, from groups of friends to business networking. These groups of networked individuals, often in similar demographic groups, have become a virtual gold mine for Internet marketers, who can place their message in front of members of their target market on social networking sites for little or no cost.

Social media networking sites have also become an easily abused Internet marketing tool, forcing social networking sites to crack down on new types of spam (such as message spam and bulletin spam on Myspace). This spam is a result of people artificially inflating “friend” counts (the number of other members in their social network) through mass-adding and bots.  The owners of these profiles will then sometimes market their own products, or charge others to have their URLs blasted to the bulletin board of thousands of other members.

Why Social Media Spam Doesn’t Work

Simply put, social networking spam doesn’t work. That’s not to say there won’t be any conversion for the marketing effort, but rather that it very rarely will offer a decent return on investment in comparison to other marketing tactics. Here’s why:

1. Huge social networking accounts rarely are filled with targeted members. Therefore, those seeing the message won’t likely be members of the target market (unless someone’s marketing something like a Facebook resource site, or a band marketing to legitimate fans, which are two exceptions to the rule)

2. Many of these paid posts (often in “bulletin” form) are only highly visible in limited quantities, based on post time, and only when a member is logged in. Therefore, most members blasted won’t ever even see the message.

3. Even if targeted members of a market do see the message, actually open the message, and actually read it, there’s still the traditionally very low response rate common in most direct marketing methods.

Ways to Use Social Media Networking Effectively for Internet Marketing

1. Build a highly targeted “friend” list, rather than using bots.

2. Personally welcome any new members of your network, or at least as many as possible.

3. Time bulletins and messages to when members of the target market will likely be online.

4. Offer something of value (like news or exclusive information) in the posts, rather than simply sending links.

5. Contact members regularly to keep the message in front of them, but don’t overdo it, to the point of looking like a spammer.

6. Join groups on social networking sites related to the niche, and promote in them where it doesn’t violate group rules.

Social Media Strategy For Auto Dealers

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If you are considering using social media marketing, consider how social media is different than paid search marketing or 3rd party lead sources like Autobytel, Dealix, or Cars.com. Social media rests much higher up the purchase funnel than traditional lead sources. While you may use social media to promote service specials and one-off inventory sales, it’s best to remember that social media is more about providing value to the community than throwing up advertisements and special offers online.

Social Media Marketing for Auto Dealers – Where do I Start?
Before you jump into social media marketing, clearly define the goals that are important to your dealership in this medium. Can you use Twitter and Facebook to service more vehicles and sell more cars, most likely you can. But remember, the social area is more about share of mind than taking action now. Using a strong social media strategy for auto dealers allows you to interact with your local market in a positive way and manage your dealership’s reputation. The most important thing you can do here is START WITH A PLAN.

twitterAs a business owner you want to control your social media message just as you do with any other marketing you do for your dealership.  After all, it’s your dealerships’ name and brand on the line. When your dealership starts down the path of engaging in social media marketing, you are putting your business and brand online for all to see. Your past and future customers can leave messages about how awesome or awful their customer experience was.

Social Media Strategy For Auto Dealers – Step One
Ok, you have decided to give social media marketing a try, so where do you begin? The first basic step in developing your social media strategy will be to determine how you’re going to generate and publish your content for the medium. Content generation and social authoring isn’t something to be taken lightly nor should it be left in the hands of your Internet department. It’s very easy for your Internet sales team to assume that “Twittering” all day is the same thing as selling cars, but it’s not. Responding correctly to inbound phone calls, walk in traffic and email leads is their primary responsibility and needs to remain their main focus. Posting Tweets and sitting on Facebook bypasses your sales processes and the hard work of actually selling cars.

Dealers that have become active in social media have quickly learned that an effective social media strategy can benefit just about every department within the dealership. Before you embrace a social media strategy for auto dealers, decide how it will be managed and who will be responsible for the content generation and placement.

Auto Dealers and Real Time Search

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Real time search for auto dealers. Think about adding it into your marketing mix – http://htxt.it/3Maz

Real Time Search For Auto Dealers

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The Impact of Real Time Search On Social Media Marketing For Auto Dealers

Bing.com recently started listing Twitter feeds, and now Google has jumped into the fray with “real-time” search. Now that real time search is here, how does it impact your online presence, if it impacts it at all? If you haven’t tried social media marketing, now is the time to get started. Real time search is here, and social media marketing for auto dealers needs to take notice. In the past, it might not have been so clear a need to engage in social media, but with these recent changes in the search engines, the relationship between social media and search engine marketing is clearly in focus.

Much more than catchy buzzword, “real-time search” is a concept that has been around for a while longer in some form or another. Fresh content has always been a driving force in Google search results, and the results from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other social sites can’t get much fresher. So now these social streams may appear right in regular SERPs.

It’s now up to the search engines to deliver relevant quality using key factors like author quality, probability of relevance and “query hotness,” all very subjective and fuzzy.  So how do you protect your dealership brand image? Start first by getting a basic knowledge of what real time search is and what it means for you and your company.

Using Google as an example, real time search for them is not a replacement for their regular google search results. in the case of Google, real time search is added technology and factors in the search algorithms that display ALL results within a standard search page. This means that content from Twitter, news sites, blogs and other social sites will appear on the same page as “regular” results.

Following closely on the heels of Google’s fairly recently launched universal search results, the addition of real-time results is just one more challenging obstacle for the much coveted high organic rankings on the top of the results page. Paid search engine marketing for auto dealers is a common tactic used to combat real time search. A well optimized paid search marketing campaign allows you much more control over where your brand or company will appear on SERP’s.

Social Media Marketing For Auto Dealers

The most obvious way to get in the game is to use your own internet marketing strategy that includes social media marketing. Your strategy might include:

  • keywords in your content, titles, and your posts,
  • mentioning current events that are relevant to your brand, business, or industry,
  • topics that people are interested in – spark a conversation,
  • a “call to action” to share your content.

In real-time search results, you may show up at the top of the results page, but that may or may not be a good thing. Using social media marketing for auto dealers is a great way to manage your reputation online and present your dealership in the most favorable light possible.

With these recent and ongoing changes to real-time search results in SERPs means you can’t afford to ignore social media. As you become more active using social media marketing in your automotive marketing campaigns, you generate more relevant content that may have find high placement on Google SERPs that display real-time results.