Social Networking for Small Businesses

Written by Daniel Travis – Brown

Promoting your small business online can be a massive contributing factor to an increase in traffic and sales to your company website. As time has progressed social networking website have encouraged millions onto the internet; the total number of worldwide internet users has grown by 480.4% since the year 2000 with the latest count clocking an amazing 2,095,006,005!

The world has become more connected than ever before and with social networking sites being used daily by users across the globe who are able to share and link information to each other, what better place to promote your products or services?

Look at the tools you have at your disposal on Facebook alone; you can have people ‘like’ your company, social status updates and a whole range of other posts you may choose to make. This is massively useful; someone who sees a friend of theirs has ‘liked’ a particular product or post is far more likely to click it and check it out themselves.

Facebook promotions are a fantastic means of reaching out to a potentially limitless audience, so be sure to give the people on your ‘friends’ list a reason to ‘like’ your page or product. Promote a prize giveaway; a lucky user will be picked from the list of people who like your page or request to add you to their ‘friends’ list. From this their friends may be drawn to your profile and decide to enter the competition too; and so on.Let’s assume we own a company that sells bathroom suites ; we have a new range of whirlpool baths in stock and we want to promote these products as much as possible. A great starting point is to ensure our own company website (let’s call it dannysbathrooms.com; not the greatest domain but you get my point) is full of great content and we’re displaying our new whirlpool baths nice and clearly on the appropriate page. Now any posts we make on Facebook about these baths can be linked to our whirlpool baths page on dannysbathrooms.com.

Now we encourage our friends to like our page with our competition; which in turn will inevitably draw in Facebook users from each of their friends list, if they view our profile and spot the easy-to-enter competition they are almost certainly going to enter at the price of clicking a ‘like’ button. While our Facebook page is popular we can use this opportunity to drop some posts about whirlpool baths and other possible sales and discounts with a link though to dannysbathrooms.com.

Remember to interact with any ‘friends’ that comment on our page. Don’t be too serious, if they wish to engage you in conversation or make an enquiry about a product then give them what they want. This will also help to humanise our brand and make us more appealing to any new visitors on our profile.

Remember, build some serious hype around your social network profile then drop links to great offers or new products you have on offer. Give incentives to gain extra likes and in turn, extra followers and friends; these tactics can work just as well on twitter but you’ll have to be a little more smart with your posts as you have a limited character count on your posts.