Friday 24 April 2015

3 Ways Your Small Business Can Use Social Networking Sites to Increase Sales

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Originally designed for the purpose of enhancing personal networking and conversation among peers, social media has evolved into one of the most powerful tools a small business can have at its disposal. In addition to spreading brand awareness, a savvy company can actually monetize its efforts through the use of several innovative strategies.

Here are three of the best options.

2. Invest in paid advertisements

Paid advertising is probably one of the best ways to monetize your social media efforts. You should approach this strategy with caution, though.

If you don’t have a proper understanding of how PPC advertising works, some advance study is warranted if you hope to avoid tally up an expensive bill. If you’re already familiar with PPC advertising, such as AdWords, on the other hand, the learning curve will be fairly gentle.

By setting your budget, optimizing your posts, and implementing a savvy bidding strategy, you can expect to boost incoming traffic fairly quickly. The key is to focus on your target audience.

Facebook is the ideal social media platform to start with, because the site and its managers know so much about its users. Facebook allows you to implement sophisticated targeting strategies.

If you already have buyer personas, you shouldn’t have any trouble accounting for those within the Facebook Ad platform. You can control everything from age, sex, and gender to buying habits, personal interests, and income level.

As a marketing tool, this has explosive potential for growth, so you shouldn’t overlook this opportunity to reach new customers.

2.     Drive traffic to targeted landing pages

A second top strategy is to use your social media business pages to drive traffic to targeted landing pages. If you employ a solution such as Spaces, you can create social landing pages with integrated payment features almost effortlessly, and quickly monetize these leads.

In order to drive traffic without the use of paid advertisements, you’ll need to invest in building a strong user community over an extended period of time. That will require an investment in excellent content and a steady effort to maintain user engagement.

3.     Use a social media selling solution

The third popular and effective strategy is to partner up with a social media selling solution, like Soldsie or inSelly. Soldsie allows you to turn the comment section on your Facebook or Instagram account into a virtual buy box; while inSelly is tagged as a “Marketplace for Instagram,” and works by aggregating Instagram photos and making them searchable on its third-party platform.

There are dozens of other social media selling solutions currently on the market. When you’re searching for one that might best fit your needs, home in on the ones that allow you to monetize leads within the platform.

Any time you can cut back on the number of clicks it takes to buy your goods or services, you’ll end up better off.

Take social media seriously

Regardless of what people tell you, it’s too easy to underestimate the power of social media to attract leads and drive sales. In 2014, the total number of e-commerce sales that came directly from social media grew by a hefty 202 percent.

Unless you want to risk missing out on the opportunity to be a part of this wave, you should take social networking sites seriously as a business tool.



from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1GpWaoh via social media strategy
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1daqx8H

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