Social Media: Make it Your Friend

For online businesses that are trying to reach customers, social media is a vital part of your marketing strategy. With over a billion people on social media sites, reaching potential customers is now easier than ever. However, many online businesses do not really know where to begin or just how to sustain a proper social media marketing campaign.

First, establishing any social media marketing campaign takes persistence of effort, interactivity and setting appropriate goals. From this foundation, your online business can grow in customers and get more repeat business as well. All of this starts by taking a look at the numerous social media sites that are currently out there and evaluating the ones that work best for your business.

The Big Three of Social Media

While there are certainly many social media sites that offer many advantages, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are currently considered at or near the top in terms of total number of accounts and overall impact for online businesses.

Each of these particular social media sites offers distinctive advantages that can be used by online businesses of all sizes to reach potential customers. In fact, it is generally better to limit the number of social media sites that you use in order to keep better track of your marketing campaigns. So, sticking to these three at least at first offers plenty of opportunities while monitoring your marketing efforts.

Facebook: This is the big one in terms of overall audience as nearly 1 billion accounts are on Facebook. For online businesses, Facebook presents plenty of opportunities from creating free pages for customers to interact with your business to purchasing ads and posting up new information, including images and video to help promote what you offer.

Twitter: By limiting itself to 140 characters or less, Twitter has become the ultimate social media messaging service. Twitter is most often used as a fast, easy way to inform establish customers about new products, coupons, discounts and so forth. When you want to send quick messages, images or even short video, Twitter is a powerful service that many people use to stay informed about their favorite online businesses.

LinkedIn: Although arguably behind Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn has also shown quite a bit of promise as the social media site that helps online business owners and entrepreneurs network together. This is a great platform for connecting to other business owners in your field. Sharing information and utilizing the powerful services that LinkedIn has to offer can help boost your overall business efforts in terms of getting new clients as well as reaching out to potential customers.

The Future of Social Media

While many social media sites will rise and arguably fall over the next few years, establishing your business on these websites is absolutely vital. By first mastering the “big three”, you can then expand into other promising social media sites to expand your business and reach new potential customers.

You should be particular aware of social media sites that work well with mobile devices since they are taking over how people surf the internet. Your efforts will be step-by-step, but before long you will have mastered the art of social media marketing.