Social Marketing Part 1: How do I do it?

The easy answer is give us a call but you probably want more information than that. It goes back to the old sales adage of "Does everyone on your street know what you do." Most of us take part in online social communities, whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn or our favorite forum. Social Marketing attempts to use those social networks to promote your products or services. It can be as simple as setting up your Facebook account to serve both as a personal and business service. A great example of this type of social networking is the success that Big Shears had on its business via online Firefighter and EMT forums. Mike, the owner of Big Shears and registered Paramedic, created a tool for EMTs and Firefighters. Mike then used his social networks in the online forums to let people know about his new product. Because of the Mike's acceptance in those communities, when new visitors ask questions about equipment, his online forum friends often promote his products for him. This is just one example in an room full of possibilities. If you want to discover how to use social marketing to improve your business' sales, give us a call. We will be happy to sit down and talk with you about it.

Social Marketing Part 2: Creating a Social Network

One of the other great social tools that are easily available to businesses are blogs. They are easy to run and can build a social community around you and/or your products and services. Blog is short for Weblog. A blog is something that contains more opinion than fact, however many "bloggers" keep to similar standards of traditional writers in the media. Blogs allow business owners to deploy content on to their site that can be commented on. This small but important aspect of the blog makes it quite unique and can be used as a tool to develop a community of people that are interested in your product or service (there also some aspects of a blog that will assist with your search engine optimization efforts). Through this community you can promote your products and services to this customer base. The key component to a blog is that fact that visitors can now participate with you. What separates a "social" website with those that are not is the ability for a visitor to participate in the content / conversation. Blogs allow visitors to jump into the discussion and offer their opinions and point of view. Many bloggers have built up such a large following that their traffic numbers rival that of The Walls Street Journal or CNN.com. Blogs can be great tools but do you need one? Give us a call and we can help you answer that question.