4 Ways any Business can Benefit from Social Media

4 Ways any Business can Benefit from Social Media!

Social media is everywhere. News programs run Twitter feeds across their screens. Bloggers invite you to link to them on Facebook.

And who doesn’t recognize the logo for My Space?

In the past month, my mother and several uncles joined Facebook.

But are social networking sites useful for something besides socializing? Can they benefit the average business?

Future Ranking’s answer is an overwhelming “yes.”

While not all businesses will, or should, use social networking in the same way, I am convinced that all businesses can benefit from social media. All it takes is a little knowledge about how social networking works.

Here are 4 ways that any business can benefit from using social media:

1. Get to Know your Audience. Last year, I attending the Blog World Expo, and was struck by this principle: “use social media to find your audience, and then hang out with them” Social media is filled with groups, fan pages, and other applications that makes it easy to find people that are interested in your product or service. But how do you find the appropriate audience?

o Use search.twitter.com to see what people are talking about that relates to your topic/industry. This can lead you in the right direction.
o Use your Facebook account to search for relevant groups and fan pages. While you’re at it, be sure to look for multiple groups/fan pages on the same subject.
o Visit forums to see where other people are hanging out in cyberspace.

Once you have located the popular hangouts that attract your target market, start engaging them in conversation.

2. Manage Your Reputation. Social media is a great place to monitor the online conversations about your business or your product—and respond to them. Many companies, in fact, hire employees specifically to monitor the online “buzz” about them and to become a part of the discussion. But first you have to find the conversations. Here are a few tools that you can use to monitor your reputation online so that you can take appropriate action:

o Once again, you can use search.Twitter.com to find conversations on Twitter that relate to you or your brand.
o For general monitoring of sites, news, and blogs you can set up a Google Alerts for your brand and main keywords to see what is happening online.
o Technorati or Google Blog Search is great for monitoring what bloggers are saying about your brand or industry.
o If you’re really serious about tracking your reputation you could get an account at Tracker. It will help you to quickly locate the conversations that are happening online.

Remember…quickly knowing what people are saying about you or your brand is critical for taking advantage of a trend or managing any bad publicity.

3. Promotions. For this, you need a lot of followers who are willing to share the information with their followers as well. Twitter’s Retweet (RT) feature is very useful for followers to pass on interesting information.
4. SEO and Traffic Benefits. Social media can be a great traffic generator. It can create buzz, recognition, and authority for your site. It also increases your page ranking on the search engines as people from all different networks start linking to them. These links will include tweets, bookmarks, and even blogs.

Putting it all Together

Here are a few places to start social your social media-marketing plan:

• Start a blog for your website. Blogs are where you will create the content that will be promoted on the social media networks.
• Start a Twitter account.
• Create a Facebook fan page.
• Set up profile pages on a few social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, Digg, and Delicious. This will give you a place to create links to your content. Be sure to create links back to your site in your profile page.

Posted By blog.futureranking.com