Using social media to promote your website or blog is a great idea—but there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. The wrong way tries to turn your entire social media audience into website readers. The right way grows your social media audience separately but regularly gets interested followers and fans to visit your site. You must get the social media promotion spot on if you want to use social to grow your business.
Using Social Media Like A Tool
Too many site owners start using social media as just another tool to promote their website. You know the type—all they do is announce fresh posts. They don’t try to build a following; they don’t interact with their fans; they just tell you what they want you to know. (I am even guilty of this)
This is the wrong approach for social media. People who want to read your latest post can already subscribe to your feed. They don’t need to hear about your every update using social media.
How You Should Be Using Social Media
There are some crazy myths about social media, but the most obvious rule for successfully using social media is to be social and that is not always simple when you are building a business. Talk to your followers and fans—don’t just broadcast to them. Don’t obsess over your site, but don’t forget to point people to it when you have content relevant to the current conversation.
If you post on your website frequently, don’t mention every fresh post in social media. Instead, only promote your very best posts. If you can’t tell the difference between your good posts and mediocre posts—wait a few hours after posting to read the comments before you promote posts on social media.
The best thing you can do on social media is train people to click your links. How do you train people? You tempt and reward them.
First you tempt them by telling them about the link you want them to click. Then, when they click the link, you reward them with something they’ll enjoy.
To make this work on social media, link only to the very best content on the Web. Each time someone clicks one of your links and enjoys the content they get, they’ll be more inclined to automatically click the next link you send.
In short, if you only link to great content, people will almost always click your links.
Now do you want to know why social media grows businesses?
There are three reasons: attention, research, and validation. Let’s look at each reason individually.
Why Social Media Attention Grows Businesses
The simplest reason why social media grows your businesses is because it helps customers notice your business. Offline businesses live by the mantra “location, location, location”, but online businesses have no way to automatically put themselves in front of customers.
A social media campaign will get your brand out in front of customers. They’ll see you tweeting or posting stories to your Facebook page. They’ll get to interact with you and start to think about you and your products or services.
Any advertising will do that, but social media can help you grow faster because social media done right is cheaper than traditional advertising and it can enter your customers conversation at the perfect moment to get them to act. That does not mean you should spend all your promotion time on sites like Twitter and Facebook as you must also consider your social media ROI (return on investment).
Why Social Media Research Grows Businesses
All the conversations which occur now on social media used to occur offline. They’re the same conversations but with one important difference—now you can listen in on them. If you’re a small business without a budget for market research, listening in on social media conversations is your best research tool.
Whenever someone mentions your brand on social media, you can see what they’re saying, whether it be good or bad. The same is true when they mention your competitors or markets you want to enter.
You can collect all of the information you need to build better products and create a great customer experience on social media—and you don’t have to pay a dime to do it. That’s why social media is a critical part of the 21st century business.
Why Social Media Validation Grows Businesses
Trying to convince somebody who’s never heard about your business to buy your products or services is hard. But nothing could be easier than selling something to someone who just heard their friend rave about how great you are.
Social media makes it easy for people to recommend brands they like to their friends and for you to jump in on the conversation at the exact moment when they’re most ready to buy.
Even more important, social media lets you demonstrate your customer service in public. If someone is disappointed with you, social media lets you “turn their frown upside down” in front of all of their friends. Satisfying a grievance in public is a great way to demonstatably guarantee your products. See how to handle negative comments about you and your business.
Best of all, the validation you receive on social media can go viral. If you get a testimonial from the friend of a famous person and the famous person retweets that testimonial, you can go from an obscure small business to making thousands of sales in a day. You shouldn’t count on this sort of big break, but you certainly have a greater chance of it happening on social media than through offline advertising.
But even without a big break, there’s no reason why social media should be ignored by any small business.
Conclusion
Separate your social media audience from your blog or business website. Use the social aspects to grow that audience and make them like you. Then every once in a while link to something great on your blog. The people in your social media audience who like you will take those opportunities to become blog subscribers so your grow your business using social media.
Image credit: Lets Build Websites
I agree that with so much content going around, it’s difficult to, as you say “get discovered”. These tips are very useful for those trying to promote a web series and reach as many people as possible. I would maybe add Pinterest as a place one could use for promotion of a web series.
hi thanks for this article these steps about social media for promotion in business was interesting
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What I struggle with is I have read so much and I understand
that you need to use social media to help you get more traffic to your site.
What I have not read much on is how do you get traffic or followers to your facebook page in the first place to then go to your site,
Even friends now a days avoid liking pages by everyone.
The more people that share, the more walls your post ends up on.. Then there is a great chance of traffic.
Hello Mitz
Social media is a place which provides you audience directly,but as you said ,It is very important how we use it. Using power of Social media smartly is one of the most important thing for blogger. Thanks for nice share.
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Hello,
Social media is really an awesome way to generate or get lot of referral traffic and also we can promote business in a short time.
Post is really detailed and informative.
Kuldeep recently posted..Top 3 Facebook Proxy Login Sites to Unblock Facebook Access
Hey Mitz, Thanks for the push. I give I am convinced. I have been just kind of gliding on with SM for a while now. I also read the Top 10 Myths in the middle of the post.
I am on my way starting today to becoming an SM aficionado.
Lance
Lance recently posted..Gotta be true, its on the internet, right?: 8 internet marketing myths!
Really good quality article! This is one of the most inspiring pieces of work I’ve read a
long time. Too many times writers don’t care what they write. It’s obvious that you do.
Thank you.
Great work,
I am fully agree with you. social media works great to grow our website ranking/business.I have website and i m using social media to grow my businesses.
Mohit Rajwani recently posted..10 Social Media Mistakes to Avoid
Nice share mitz. Social media too have become a very powerful source of attracting traffic. There was a time when I lost all of my search traffic due to some unexpected Google update, at that time I was left only with my email subscriber & social network follower. at that time I was getting significant traffic with the help of social network only as I have a large number of social network follower over internet. So it had worked great for me. Thanks for writing this very informative article.
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Nice post mitz,
social media is the best tool to publicize anything, however I want to go beyond Facebook and promote myself on Google+, twitter etc. I want to attract viewer in social media without making them bore, any tips for that.
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Hi mitz
nice article social media site is always helpful to promote your website and increase readability. facebook,tweeter and pinterest is top social media site. thanks for sharing.
Yes using social media your business are in big help, but you must sharing your website, blogs… via social media constantly with the right amount, not so much and not so little for success. But social media are just the cherry on top of the cake
Agree.. I am getting a decent traffic from social networking sites.. Bloggers can use the facebook groups for promoting their posts. I just joined some of the groups recently which is giving more traffic to my blog.
Vivek recently posted..Very High Page Rank Dofollow Commentluv Blogs List 2013
Hey Mitz,
Nice post and Thanks for sharing this post with us. Social media sites really play an important role in BLOGGING. Social media sites helps in promoting our blog and also drives traffic to our blog.
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Hi Mitz.
I totally agree with your point about the Effect of Social Media on Business those days. We can denies many strong opportunity and advantages of its. But we have to deal with some advantages that provided such as: security, hackers , very dangerous.
Thanks for your valuable information.
Stephan Wu
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Hi Mitz,
While I also agree Social media is important, it’s also important to not be
to distant from conventional methods of reaching your audience. If everyone
“hops on the bandwagon” of social media, it then becomes a flooded market.
Old conventional methods such as post mail or advertising in news papers will
be easier to convert your target audience because they will be less filled as
everyone has moved digital.
Thanks for the post,
Alastair
I am guilty of using broadcasts to promote my blog posts. I haven’t really delved into social media because of my short time schedule.
Your post definitely make sense and makes me want to step into it and begin using it again.
How much time does one need to implement a good social media marketing strategy that will help them build their online presence? I don’t have a lot of time and don’t really want to start something if I won’t have the time that it takes.
Thanks for sharing these tips, it really makes a lot of sense of how to begin using social media.
Have a great week.
Susan Velez recently posted..Flippin Websites Product Creation Update Progress Report
Great discussion Mitz. I do agree about the value of social media for business today. But one thing for sure about it is we should never forget the social aspect.
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