social media | Julia's Virtual Assistant Service

Nowadays, most businesses are using the internet for different purposes. With the increasing results from social media, it is not surprising that businesses find it to be the most useful tool in their online marketing strategies. Yet, there are still some businesses that didn’t even put effort to perfect their social media use. Being so, they are present online but are not reaping the numerous benefits that social media could do for their business.

Is your business one of them?

Now, don’t fret just yet because many businesses have suffered the same fate. The thing is you’re here and seeking remedies. So that means you want to be free from mistakes and want to improve use of social media for your business. Here’s how to clarify your next moves:

1. Define your goals. In any aspect of a business, goals are most important. You need to set your goals in order to measure your room of improvement. Before doing any campaign or promotion, set a realistic and doable goal. For example, you’re doing business in local area and you wanted to use the social media marketing to create a website or maybe a blog for your business. Your main goal here is to increase web traffic to increase popularity in turn. See? Setting a goal is a great help because it provides direction, and you will have different strategies on how to use the social media effectively.

2. Acknowledge you audience. Gaining lots of audience can also make your business a success. But, you must gain trust their trust first. To do so, you must make them feel how valuable and important they are. Building a connection with them is a start, or for those who wish to reach out to you, acknowledge their moves.

3. Engage with your customers. This is all about interacting with your audience. So how do you engage with your customers? What is now the level of your interaction with them? Speaking directly to your customers and speaking to them in social medium is a big difference. You could start with asking them about their opinions. Call your top ten clients so you will know their insights and feedbacks. These are ways of making them feel their voice matters.

Second, provide a way for your customers to complain. You don’t want your customers to be unhappy, right? So, it is much better if you provide a way so you can easily answer to their complaints. Lastly, always respond to them. Every time you ask about their opinions or suggestions, make sure that you respond. It makes them feel that you value them and realize that their opinions are important to you. Because of this, they will engage you more. Lastly, campaign and engagement are different. When you say campaign, it is clearly having a pack of people doing something for a specific purpose. Engagement of your clients is all about a commitment that needs to be sustained.

4. Don’t focus on one social media channel. What comes into your mind if you hear the word “social media”? Is it Twitter? Perhaps Facebook? Those are just examples of social networking sites that people are using to communicate with each other nowadays. Always remember that different people from different platforms are the ones that you are attracting.

So, always make sure that they know on how to get in touch with you on different platforms and various channels. Remember that your audience isn’t using just one platform so tap them all by being in the avenues they’re active in.

Those are just some of the things that you should do to avoid making a mistake in social media marketing. Whether you business will be successful or not, the fate of you business is still in your hands. Just always remember to do your best.

Most people ask the wrong questions when talking with marketers: “How can you make money off social networks?”

The value is placed on social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn, Mixx, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Twitter and Flikr, while ignoring the real reason these networks were setup and how you can use those ideas to help your business……

The top social networking websites which are Facebook, Twitter, and now Pinterest were founded as a way to stay in touch with friends and family and to meet new people online that all share the same ideas. LinkedIn has a similar slant – it is great for entrepreneurs and professionals who want to keep track of their contacts for hiring / outsourcing. Flicker is just a blindingly simple tool for sharing photos.

The success of social networks marks a dynamic shift in how people are using the Internet. We have evolved from just searching for information to creating and participating in social spaces with other individuals through the Internet. This model is based upon the hive mentality where people identify themselves as part of a group with similar likes and interests that draw them together.

Social networks make viral marketing and word-of-mouth marketing much easier than before. The best use of social networks is not to make money ‘directly’ off them, but to harness their marketing potential and to use them to market your own business. The best way to do that is to optimize your website (including the process of link building) for your target keywords.

Online social networks present an efficient platform for you to use in the spread of your marketing message. In addition, they are also a great tool for getting tons of visitors and thousands of page views to your site.

What this all means is that you need to devote more of your attention towards how you can leverage the traffic you do receive from these sources. To do that, you should allow your visitors to create their own social network centered on your niche topic. The power of this cannot be missed since social networks allow for multiple points of connections between almost anyone on Earth, giving them the ability to find, share, enjoy, and track anything and everything that tickles their fancy.

Social network marketing works in the exact same fashion, except people choose to provide your link without being asked to do so, and places like del.ici.ous, Digg, Blogpulse, and Technorati give them the ability to do that. In offline terms, that means turning towards your friends and family to ask for their opinions. Online, it means turning towards a group of trusted people whose opinions and recommendations you value.

In fact, in lots of cases, you’ve probably done some research on your own, using the traditional search engine marketing model and then turned to a social network that you’re a part of to validate your findings and complete your research by getting their experiences and opinions about the topic. This is social network marketing at work in its purest form.

Online social networks provide the platform needed to speak out (if they are so inclined) or to simply watch the conversations as they happen.