How Can Social Networking Help My Online Business?

Posted by markpage on Sunday Oct 31, 2010 Under Business Articles

After launching your website you try and figure out ways to drive traffic to your site. So you look into online advertising and you ask yourself, how can social networking help my online business? If you don’t know what social networking might be this article will explain to you what it is and how to utilize its powers. If you aren’t taking advantage of this form of advertising, you are missing out on major amounts of traffic, the more traffic you drive to your website the better the odds of making that sale! With social networking’s growing popularity, the sooner you start the better odds that you will pick up the most visitors you can.

What is social networking?

Social NetworkingWhat is social networking? Well answered simply, social networking is a form of advertising online that will allow you to reach many people online that want to follow your business. When someone wants to ‘follow’ your business, every time you post anything your post will show in front of them when they go to their social networking account, this means that whoever is following you wants to know more about your business or what you are offering. Unlike a blog, social networking works through community websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn just to name a few of the bigger social networking websites.

A great use of social networking (that we use here at TheCreativePage.com) is to advertise your new offering, features or updates to your website. Every time we do almost anything, we post it on our Facebook & Twitter pages to let everyone know what’s going on with our company.

How Does Social Networking Benefit My Online Business?

Social NetworkingHow does social networking benefit my online business? It’s a great question that is pretty simple to answer. You get to see all of your followers and they get to see your business inner workings and they get to contact your business directly with any issues or questions that they might have. With this type of advertising you get to build a rapport with your clients and get them to entrust in you.

Trust is an important factor when it comes to which providers of services or products consumers choose from online. If they think that your website or business sounds and looks like a shady operation, they will very easily click onto the next website and forget all about yours. To build a rapport with your customers is invaluable and all it takes is a little time out of your day to do so.

After you build the rapport with your followers they will eventually become loyal customers and will use your products and services on a more consistent basis. Provide all of your customers with great value and great customer service, they will come back more and more often and they will even tell their friends and family about you!

We all have our certain websites that we know and trust and continue to purchase from and use services through them and this is what social networking can do for people that don’t know all about your business just yet. Once you gain their trust once, that’s all it takes. You take your car to the same mechanic all the time, you have the same company cut your grass and even have the same company clean your pool, you yourself are a loyal customer.

Social Networking Demands That You Stay Active!

Social NetworkingOnce you setup your social networking accounts they demand that you stay active, so you need to post a quick introduction and suggest your business link to all of your friends. Just like with a workout routine you need to keep up with it by continuing to run everyday. Without posting often, your biggest competitors will continue to post new products, or updates to the site, perhaps even some free gift card giveaways and your business will be drowned out by them. Even small posts count as a post, just don’t let your posts be something small all the time or posts that don’t give your followers the chance to reply or comment on your post. Posting photos and videos on your social networking accounts are also a great way to draw in your followers and entice them to want to learn more or pay you for your services or products.

Keeping up with your competition might require you to log in a few times a day. This could be difficult for some business owners because of location or constantly on the road, for instances like this there are some free programs out there that will allow you to write posts beforehand and the software can be programmed to post a specific message or link at a specific time on a specific date. So you can write months worth of posts in an afternoon and let the software post everything to your accounts for you.

Social Networking Makes The World Your Oyster!

Social NetworkingSocial networking makes the world your oyster, after all the hard work has been completed of your website design being finalized and put live, after you submitted your site to every search engine you think of, after creating your social networking accounts, posting to them and then gaining a community of loyal followers and they’ve helped your business grow almost overnight, so remember who helped you get as far as you will. Give back to your local community of followers as they will continue to follow you for years to come, treat them well.

If you have enjoyed reading this article and think it could help out anyone you know, please feel free to post a link to this page, or share it within your StumbleUpon, Facebook or twitter accounts!

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