Depending on your experience with social media, the thought of using it for advertising your business might be a scary topic. Unlike traditional advertising methods, social media puts a lot of trust and responsibility in the hands of the consumer. By using this medium wisely, social media can be the catalyst for growth in sales. You will connect with your customers on a personal level, fostering relationships that bring more business your way. How? This article aims to provide the novice user of Facbook, LinkedIn, and Twitter with initial information for using these outlets as marketing tools.
Facebook
Google reviews state that there are nearly one billion search results for “Facebook” on their site. To put that into perspective, there are almost three search results for every man, woman, and child in America. It’s easy to see that Facebook is the largest and therefore, best place to advertise in social media today. It offers the largest readership and the most developed advertising platform compared to other social networks. Advertising on Facebook remains relatively cheap, making it a competitive choice over options such as Google AdWords, which can cost significantly more.
Facebook allows companies to focus on two areas: targeting groups or making a network. Targeted ads allow you to use the information Facebook collects on all of its members. How can this be useful? By allowing you to focus on a massive number of data combinations, for example: men over 50 who like smooth jazz, you are able to find your target audience in a snap. If you choose instead to make a network, you can make a page on Facebook. You can then pay to advertise that page and gain “likes,” thus developing your own network of fans on Facebook with whom to communicate.
LinkedIn
If you want the same type of groups targeting with a smaller network, LinkedIn is a viable alternative. While you won’t get the same data to market your groups, you get a finer grain of targeting so you can specifically advertise to people with, for example, a certain job title, like “Director of Operations.” LinkedIn is made for business networking. Therefore, if business professionals are your target audience, it is a wonderful tool. However business professionals are not the group you want to attract, you should look to advertise elsewhere.
Twitter
Despite Twitter’s great success, it has the least developed advertising platform of any of the social networks. In terms of sponsored advertisements, all you can do with Twitter is buy a sponsored tweet or pay to promote a trend on the main page.
To use Twitter successfully, a company must manually building up its network by gaining followers and following the right people. This method of networking will make your voice more prominent. The draw to using Twitter, as opposed to other social media platforms, is the “snowball effect” that you can have: you tweet, your followers retweet, the followers of your followers retweet, etc.
Twitter also makes it possible for your business to become searchable as people tweet about you. For example, someone’s search for “carpet cleaners” will find your business if you get people tweeting about it. Twitter also allows your message to be placed fully in the public rhelm, as opposed to a more focused network like Facebook, which is concentrated on the immediate network of a person and their friends.
As you can see, in order to find success via advertising in the social networking market, you must first determine your audience. Are you interested in a local or more global outreach? In the end, social media advertising is one of the least expensive and most efficient ways for placing your business in the public eye. If you haven’t yet, take the time to explore social networking and its advertising possibilities for your business.
