Many businesses have websites to tell people about the products or services they offer. But their audience has to type the domain name, do a search or click a link on another website to find their business website. A great way to tell people about your business website is to post the link on your personal social networking account.
Most people with Internet access already have at least one social networking account. The most popular social networks are MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for general audiences. There are also social networks for business such as LinkedIn that allow people to refer their business or someone else's to people.
MySpace was created primarily for musicians to share music with fans but other entertainment pages do well here. MySpace allows you to post events with your own custom templates. Those events can be made public or private. You can tell people about events by sending bulletins or emails or posting links to the events. You may have a sales event, a party, a grand opening, a benefit or other reason to share information with a large audience. The events very useful and a great addition to your profile information that can be edited at your convenience.
Facebook was later created to be a simpler version of MySpace but it has become cluttered with game apps, too. Facebook allows you to create a business page, but you can only have ONE business page. That means you cannot create a personal profile page and a business page with the same name (or email address). You can post events on Facebook but you can't customize the template.
Twitter is an even simpler social network where you can simply update your status. If you haven't twittered, that simply means you can post a few sentences about what you did, what you plan to do or some other comment you would like to share with the public. You can share photos here just as you can on MySpace or Facebook. The best thing about these top social networks is that you can often share info or photos with other social networking accounts.
LinkedIn was designed for business people to network with each other for business, not personal reasons. You must accept a friend request just like the first three social networks. You can send friend requests to people you already know and refer people you know to other people. You can choose to watch businesses to be notified of any posts they make. Many people use this feature to see about job openings, but this can be a useful news resource.
If you want to bring more traffic to your website, you can use social networking to
share new information with existing customers and find new customers.
Encourage your customers to refer friends to you.
Encourage your customers to post comments about your products or services.
Treat your customers like family and friends. Remember to wish a happy birthday to your friends.
Do not be a pushy salesperson and spam people. Do not post a link to your website on someone else's page.
Notify people of sales, discounts, clearance, grand openings and other specials.
Post a link to your website in your status posts on your personal page and your business page.
Spend a few minutes each day posting status updates and try to add a new friend each day.
Embrace the social networking phenomenon and have a better, more interactive relationship with your customers. Word of mouth is now happening on the Internet and you can share more information with more people faster. It only takes a few minutes a day to post updates. So add social networking to your Internet advertising strategy and keep everyone informed.
Yvette Kuhns, Power Pages Web Design, May 24, 2010
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