Social Media and Your Business

Stop looking at social media and the internet as automatic teller machines. There are a few amazing stories about people, who have gone from rags to riches using the internet and or social media to pave their road to great wealth. So yes, it is possible to dramatically accelerate your success, if you leverage these amazing new forms of media properly. The likely hood of every business experiencing similar results is as likely as every person on the planet winning the national lottery. So for you and your business to leverage the maximum benefit from social media and the internet, see this new technology for what it really is supplemental tools, which will support and enhance your networking and marketing efforts.

Any business that wants to thrive in the new global market place, must therefore adopt both targeted social media and internet optimisation strategies, into their businesses. The challenge is to look on these wonderful new tools that are available and see them for what they really are. They are not the one stop, quick fix solution, which every entrepreneur has been searching for, that will solve all their marketing and networking issues. They are really incredible tools, which when used properly can accelerate and multiply your networking and marketing efforts.

How Do I Use This New Technology?

Dipping your toe into the social media arena once a week and putting a website up, is most certainly not going to get the phone ringing and open the floodgates, as orders just pour through the door. Social media and the internet are powerful supplemental tools, which will support your marketing and networking efforts. They are by no means ever going to become your entire marketing and networking one stop shop. The secret to make this strategy work for you is to remember that the fundamentals of business have not changed. People still buy from businesses they know, like, trust and offer the best value to them or their businesses.

Your objective when using designing your social media and internet strategy, is to use the new technology to help you to get the right people, in the right place, who need what you are selling, to get to know, like and trust you and your product and service.

Understanding Social Media as a business tool

Social media has transformed the way that businesses can connect and interact with their markets. Consumers have a much greater expectation around communication and they expect almost instant responses from any product or service provider. They want to know that business is listening to them and that their needs are being met exactly how they want them to be met.

Social media has opened a whole new way of doing business and offers businesses an amazing tool to market their products and services. It also offers a voice to consumers and empowers them to demand better products and services from businesses.

Businesses that will thrive over the next few years will grab hold of this opportunity with both hands and start to listen to what their markets are asking for. They will provide exactly what the market wants and ensure that they communicate this very clearly via a targeted marketing strategy via social media.

The challenge facing all businesses right now is pressure from all sides to dive into social media and to just become immersed in the conversation. This is a really dangerous strategy and businesses will do more harm than good by plunging blindly into something they know nothing or very little about. Any business that wants to get involved with social media must follow some basic business principles.

1.    Know exactly what your objective is with the strategy.

2.    Develop a plan that clearly outlines your objectives and vision

3.    Build measurement criterion into your strategy and constantly measure your progress against these criterion.

4.    Constantly tweak and improve your strategy, until it delivers on your expectations.

5.    Target your connections and clearly outline the purpose of using each type of social media.

Social media and the internet are merely new platforms for getting our message out to the people that will learn to know, like and trust our businesses. Social media offers a better/different platform than traditional marketing methods such as magazines; TV, radio spots etc., but fundamentally the requirements to create a successful marketing campaign are the same. Businesses must still find ways to get the right consumers in their target markets to know, like, trust and value their market offerings.

Getting Started

The first step in the process is to commit to get educated about social media and what it offers. This is really simple and begins by searching on the internet by typing the question you want answered in Google. Any question you may have about social media and how to leverage it in your business will easily be answered on the internet. Remain objective and steer clear of the myriad of offerings of instant success and making millions by merely spending 30 minutes a day on the internet or social media.

Once you have a rudimentary understanding about how social media can help your business and how to begin building your social media strategy. You can hire the services of a professional social media coach to help you to build an effective strategy. Due diligence is advised. As with any business decision, be very selective about whom you hire. There are a myriad of so called experts clamouring to become part of this new trend.

As you are getting started sign up for TweetBeep alerts and just listen to the conversation that is going on in your target market. Listen to what people may be saying about yours or your competitor’s products or services. Observe how your competitors are communicating with the market and the type of feedback they are receiving form the market. This will give you a great starting point to gauge how to position your message and communication in your target market.

Social media is a new and exciting interactive communication tool that when leveraged properly will accelerate your business to new heights of success.

Leveraging Social Media to network and market your business

Avoid the urge to jump headlong into social media. Throwing everything you have at building massive networks of strangers. This is a pointless strategy, which wastes massive resources and gets very little or no business opportunities at all. All this strategy does is create awareness, about who you and your company are, with people who don’t really care and most certainly won’t buy what you have to sell.

Basic business principals will always apply, so before you rush headlong into creating a social media strategy, first make sure you know, who your ideal client is. Armed with this information you can now enter the social media arena and start to search where you can find these people.

Action Idea: Explore your product and/or service and identify your ideal client, who has a need, which your product or service can satisfy. This is the most crucial step when designing your social media strategy. The next step is to get your computer guru to help you to find where these people hang out on the social media platforms.

Once you have found the forums, or platforms where these people hang out. The next step is to begin connecting with these targeted individuals and communicating valuable information to them on a regular basis. The way to be successful when using social media to get this targeted group of people to know, like and trust you and your business, is to give really valuable information freely and to engage in relevant conversations with these people, by commenting on their blogs or posts. Over time you will be regarded as the expert and people will approach you to help them solve a challenge or supply a product or service. Success when using social media as a business tool is always about giving, sharing and caring and never about taking.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za