Your clients and competitors are all on social media, right? While that may be a sweeping generality, when you consider that there are more than 8,000,000,000 on the various social media platforms, you certainly could be missing opportunities. As with real estate, when it comes to reaching your potential clients it is all about location, location, location and it makes sense to be where the client base is.
Here are seven of the many reasons you should be involved in social media:
- Use social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter or any of the number of profession-specific social media platforms as a way to help promote your website and drive traffic to it.
- Use social media as a way to promote articles you’ve written or blog posts you’ve put up on your website. Additionally, if you have a particular of expertise on which you focus, you should be writing blog posts or articles as a way to become known as the expert in your particular field. From accounting to zoology, article writing helps grow your brand and promote your expertise.
- Build your brand on social media. Use your logo on the social media pages, complete your profile and use your social media platforms to build brand awareness – but not through constant marketing or “selling” to your followers.
- Build customer relationships. Individuals today want to do business with someone, or a company, with whom they feel a connection. If they see your face on your social media pages, they subconsciously connect with you as a person rather than a business owner.
- Arrange an in-person meeting through your social media platforms. While meeting and connecting through online sites is a great initial contact, there is still nothing that brings business people together like a face-to-face meeting. If you and your potential business contacts live in opposite corners of the country, set up your face-to-face via Skype or any of the other number of web video chat platforms.
- Increase your income through social media interactions. The relationships you build online can lead to more work for you, finding work for others, building relationships on which you can piggyback to enhance your company’s offerings. Say, for example, you are a website designer or builder you could connect with a writer to offer copy writing services for your website builds.
- Expand your area of influence. Want to become a speaker? Write blog posts, update your status and show your expertise. Become known as the go-to person in your field of specialization.
Spend some time each day navigating the stream of social media and see how your business benefits from your efforts.