Best Social Media Sites to advertise your Business – and how to leverage the social media sites to advertise your business
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Which sites consistently STILL give you the biggest bang for your buck?
Despite the rapid rate at which new social media sites for business 2012 have emerged, is it really that hard to know which are the best social media sites to advertise your business?
In this rapidly growing Information Age, it’s a real shame that many businesses fail to properly leverage the social media sites and tend to consider social networking as a hobby, completely ignoring tested and proven approaches that have resulted in not only great communication with their customers and fans but substantial increase in sales for their businesses and their branding.
Here’s the quick run down on the best social media sites to advertise your business and some keys on how to leverage the social media sites to advertise your business.
1. Facebook – 1.7 billion visitors
Facebook Fan Pages. Facebook launched Pages for businesses and brands in November 2007, yet many business marketers still use personal profiles to try to promote their business. For example, a friend of ours owns a small restaurant and he chose to use the restaurant’s name as the personal account’s first and last names. first of all, when people try to look up the restaurant of Facebook, it is near impossible to find it because the search engine thinks it’s a person. And if that did find it, they cannot “Like ” a personal profile and that is important when it comes to ranking with these social media sites and the search engines.
Without a Fan Page, you have no access to advertising options, analytics, apps for business use, and many other features. Plus, maintaining a personal account for anything other than an individual is a violation of Facebook’s Rules and Regulations and you could get yourself permanently banned.
URLs in Status Updates: This is such a “no no” in social media marketing. Comments in the status updates are for COMMENTS. Don’t be lazy and leave the hypertext of a linked item in the body of a status update. What is screams out to everyone is “We don’t really care about the message itself, we really just want to promote our business or product.” If you let the link appear in the box below that update, you can delete the link in the status update and it will display Take a look and ask yourself, which one of these looks better:
See the example below:
Quantity vs. Quality? How to leverage the social media sites to advertise your business
Yes, you want your Edge-ranking to be high, so posting regularly (try to post daily) is important but it’s the quality and relevance of that content to your fans and customers that matters. When you generate content based on the type of information your fans need, like, and can benefit from it’s a win-win situation for everyone.
Ask a question or end with a call to action. Asking questions gets people coming back. And be sure to reply back to any comments. Don’t create one-way conversations and don’t leave people hanging. And a call to action – well, is a call to action…. invite people to “like, comment and share) your content. Get it going viral or what you write will end up being just an exercise in futility.
There are several other mistakes marketers make when they are advertising on Facebook. They don’t target their ads to specific demographics and analytics, they neglect to complete their profile (this is great advertising space and it’s free). They fail to auto-post content to their Facebook Page and don’t place a call-to-action in their Cover Photo, again FREE advertising real estate that is not being leveraged.
2. YouTube: 550 million viewers
Advertising on YouTube- and No, we’re not talking about paid advertising – we are talking about FREE advertising. Video is probably the most powerful and easiest ways to promote your business and/or brand yourself, through a series of videos that you can post up on your own YouTube channel – and one of the best ways to go viral – and it costs nothing if you shoot and produce your own videos. Make sure the the video title and meta tags are keyword optimized as obviously, the search engines can’t detect what your video is about.
3. Twitter: 50 million users
For the average business there are essentially two major types of ways to buy advertising on Twitter. “Promoted Accounts” and “Promoted Tweets”.
The purpose of following someone on Twitter is to create an online affinity or relationship with someone so it’s all about promoting your Twitter’s brand account and teasing and tempting people to follow you through Twitter’s paid advertising campaigns. This can be achieved in one of two ways: have your Twitter account featured in the search results or in the “who to follow” section. The other option is to use Promoted Tweets. You can purchase they on a Cost-per-Engagement (CPE) basis, which means you only pay if a person re-tweets, replies to, clicks or favorites your CPE Tweet. One great cost saving benefit to CPE is impressions on Re-tweets are not chargeable and can be a huge leverage to you, making this one of the best social media sites to advertise your business.
Twitter is a practical and useful way of viral bookmarking your product or website as an online marketer, as long as you are providing useful and relevant content to your target audience. Short “tweets” written well, can be very effective and getting people’s attention and inviting them to read more about what you have to offer. get people’s attention very effectively.. Offer useful information such that target audience and your targeted customers or clients would be “following” you. To attract attention, use catchy and intelligent copy-writing when tweeting. You could also follow related people who are in your area of business and interests.
Twitter Trivia: did you know that Twitter was almost called “status” and then “Twitch”? Then hunting and pecking through the dictionary they ran across the “twitter”. the definition? – “‘a short burst of inconsequential information” hhmmm.
Conclusion
It is no exaggeration when we say that social media sites have become an integral part of our lives and the world is becoming a much smaller place because of it. In addition, the world of advertising has also become a much smaller arena and the ability to reach out and “touch” people is literally at our fingertips.
The key is keep a pulse on the big social media giants and watch behind them for the newbies as they come marching right up behind them.
We still believe that the best social media sites to advertise your business are and will be the 3 big giants and you need to leverage those social media sites as much as possible. Make sure you identify clearly what your needs are when advertising to determine the most effective means of communication and then choose the right channels to broadcast your message.
The best social media sites to advertise your business will be determined by you knowing how to leverage the social media sites to advertise your business.
If you are looking for more information on how to get your business website on Page 1 of Google, for some very important tips.
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Bo and Mandy Snell
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