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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.

Small Business Blogging

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Blogging for Small Business

What’s the real value of blogging for small businesses? Blogging for small businesses can be especially powerful and is often the first gateway into social media. If you want to use your blog for business growth it’s vital to give your audience unique content with a personal touch that your website alone often does not provide. Consider your small business blogging options – a slash blog integrated into your website or as a stand alone blog with a unique domain name. Each offers a different value for your business, but both must offer frequent relevant content that wows the reader in order to be successful.

Start Blogging for Small Business

Here are a few tips to get you started on your small business blog;

  • Writes about the part of your business you are most passionate about
  • Customize your blog’s design to mirror your business website style and appearance
  • Include comments on your blog about business related topics and articles with links when appropriate
  • Keep blog posts short, relevant and to the point. Focus!
  • Include relevant tags in each blog post
  • Use Categories to make relevant posts easier to find
  • Make your small business blog a resource for your business, not just another sales promotion tool
  • Adopt a lighter writing style which can make you more approachable and personal but keep it clean. The blog represents your business online.
  • Use your small business blog as a way to communicate with customers, keep them up to date on new products and services, as an active newsletter, or user manual.
  • Add a QR code on your business cards to link to your blog or your main business main url

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.