7 business development marketing tips for social media

I would have heard so many marketers tell everyone to use social media as part of their promotional marketing mix. The Internet is awash with information about the use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. Numerous articles have been written on how using social media can help promote your brand image and how you can generate web traffic for your main business website.

Keep in mind that social media is a marketing tool and only effective when used correctly to promote your business.

The key question for a business is “How do you leverage social media to generate real customers and income?” In the digitally connected society, your current customers, regardless of age, gender, or financial status, will be active on social media sites.

Here are some of the latest usage statistics on social media usage that will make a business take notice:

• 68% of small businesses will increase their social media marketing efforts in the next year.
• 56% of Twitter users say they use the microblogging site for business or work purposes.
• More than 40% of people have become ‘friends’ or ‘likes’ of a brand / company on Facebook or MySpace
• 20% of tweets are about commercial products.
• 46% of Facebook users say they would talk about or recommend a product on Facebook.
• 44% of Twitter users have recommended a product
• Social media played a big role in holiday shopping: 28% of shoppers say social media has influenced their purchases

Only on the Facebook site:

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of active users log into Facebook on a given day.
• The average user has 130 friends
• People spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on Facebook
• There are over 160 million pages, groups, and events that people interact with.
• The average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events.
• The average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
• Men and women use social sites almost equally (47% vs 53%)
• 61% of Facebook users are middle-aged or older, with an average age of 37 years.
• Young people ages 18-24 do not dominate any particular social networking site; are scattered everywhere
• More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

Your company’s involvement in social media should go without saying, however, many businesses will establish social media sites and will make no effort to participate and participate in the groups that their potential customers use.

To be successful in using social media, your business must figure out where your potential customers spend time on these sites so that you can interact with them where they prefer and not where you prefer or feel comfortable. Participation and commitment to their social networks will form a platform from which to build relationships with communities of interest. This, in turn, will provide a new customer acquisition channel utilizing the shared and similar capabilities of the social media world. This “sharing” is the equivalent of word of mouth in traditional marketing.

Here are the 7 business development marketing tips for using social media:

1. Go where your customers are and not where you feel comfortable

To find your customers on social media sites, consider the following:

• Conduct a survey among your potential customers or clients.
• Analyze and monitor traffic on social sites to discover how and where customers share information about your business and your competitors.
• Review market research or statistical information on the usage and demographics of different social media sites.

2. Participate and interact

Participation in social media is conversation and your participation in social media groups and communities is critical to building relationships. Your value as a participant is judged by the value you bring to the community as a whole. You can do this by freely sharing relevant, interesting and useful information.

3. Investigate the activities of your competitors

You need to collect competitive information that can help in your efforts. Conduct a competitive analysis of your top five competitors’ use of social media for the following:

• The social media sites in which they actively participate.
• The type of content they post
• The number and type of followers, fans, and views.
• Promoted products, programs or events

4. Launch offers and programs that are exclusive to your social media channels.

You must give importance to your social networks with exclusive offers for these promotional channels. This will attract potential customers to share with their networks the offer that is not available in other marketing channels.

As an example, provide an exclusive offer for your social media channel, such as a discount coupon or voucher.

5. Participation in social networks requires authenticity and transparency

The words “authenticity” and “transparency” are overused a bit nowadays, yet these are cornerstones of social media success. Be a real human being in your interactions. This is the foundation for building trust and connections with real people on social media groups and networks.

6. Look for opportunities for value in sales through social networks.

Take the opportunity to take advantage of social networks to sell your products and / or services by offering relevant articles that are of value to your followers. Make it easy for them to buy from these social media channels.

7. Always test and refine based on the results generated

Social media programs as a marketing channel are not exempt from testing and refining their messages and offers. You should make the effort to test, collect results and analyze how it can be improved before launching the program to the entire channel.

Apply these 7 marketing tips for using social media and they will provide you with the foundation to successfully develop and grow your business using these communication channels.