Marketing through social media is primarily a brand awareness, top of the funnel strategy for most businesses. If you are selling certain small price tag consumer products, Instagram may be your best bet to book sales. Otherwise you will probably be using social media to engage potential customers early in the buying cycle.
The basic strategy for marketing using social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, is to build a targeted network of users. Once you have that network setup you can post messages that will show up on the homepage of all those who follow you. Depending on your level of engagement with other users, this can build your reputation, and spread the word about your business.
For example a realtor could create posts about market trends, strategies for negotiating price, etc. They could also comment on topics posted by others adding their expertise to the conversation. They could also post listings advertising a property they have for sale, or a property they have sold, or bought for a client. In this way they can become known as a trusted professional, and when the time comes for one of their followers to buy or sell a house, they could make the shortlist of Realtors to hire.
Restaurants, bars, night clubs, and entertainment venues are other examples where social media can inform a large group of networked users, and that information will be welcomed.
The use of social networks for promoting professional services can be tricky, and if not done carefully, may either backfire, or be a waste of time and effort. If you just spam your followers with business promotion, it isn’t going to be long before you are unfollowed.
Besides engaging with other users’ posts, another activity on social media that can have a significant impact is the promotion of articles on your business website’s blog. This is done by creating Tweets on Twitter or posts on a Facebook page that point to a blog article on the businesses website. That blog article needs be very high quality and useful to the intended target audience to stand out from all of the noise on the Internet. One the prospect lands on your webpage, you obviously want to expose them to your brand, and you can expose them to a limited amount of promotion for your products or services. Don’t overdo it though, because search engines differentiate your content as either transactional or informational, and if not siloed properly, your content could be misidentified, which will hurt your natural SEO efforts.
Automation is widely used in social media marketing and can save you a lot of time when posting the same content to the all the social networks that make sense for your business. Platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to schedule your social media posts for times of the day other users are more likely to see them.
The most common (and free) method to get followers on Twitter is to start following a lot of people. A certain percentage will reciprocate. Most of your followers will probably be marketers or other people trying to sell the same product or service as you. You can certainly place a "Follow Me on Twitter" link on your website or blog too.
To get fans of your Facebook page, you can put the link on your website, and people clicking over to that page can become a fan by clicking a link. You can also run a Facebook advertising campaign to gain followers, but in my opinion the quality of those followers will likely be of lower quality.
On any social networking platforms, success requires 1) High quality content, 2) a high level of engagement, and 3) ongoing measurement to ensure your efforts are having the intended results. Just throwing up a profile and checking in once in a while is a waste of time. If you want to succeed in the promotion of your business through social networking, you need to budget the time necessary to do the job right.
TP Designs promotes websites in the San Francisco Bay Area through Pay Per Click (PPC) Adwords Campaign Management and SEO