Social media marketing is an economical and powerful way to advertise your brand, although fairly new to the online marketing realm; everyone is jumping on the social media bandwagon.

Social media is useful because you are engaging yourself with your audience; you can listen and respond or sit back and see what your audience thinks of your brand. Twitter is the most useful tool for engaging with your followers, who are all potential customers. No other platform will let you interact and hear the views of your audience in real-time. You can quickly answer queries and interact with your followers, gaining a rapport and thus projecting your brand. Once this rapport is gained, you can tweet the occasional subtle sales message, as long as you aren’t spamming your followers, a little plug here and there won’t do any harm.

Once you’ve found your followers and your followers have found you, this will lead to other followers recommending you if you keep up your brand reputation. Hold competitions for followers to win something from your brand, make them ‘direct message’ (DM) you the answer to your competition in order to win, and in order to do that they will need to follow you and you follow them back. Offering something with value, or bribery as I often call it, will always increase brand awareness, not just within social media.

An easy way to establish new followers on Twitter is to use its search box to search your brand or things relevant to your brand, this way you can discover what people are saying about your brand and respond to people’s questions. If the question is not to do with your brand but relevant to your brand, reply to them and you’ve probably gained a new follower.

Remember to give your brand a ‘voice’ on Twitter; make sure it suits your brand’s personality and also is relevant to your audience. For example, writing in text jargon isn’t going to appeal to an audience of people over 60 years old, this is why it is very important to keep your voice appropriate.

Other social media platforms can also be used to promote your business; you could use Flickr, a photo sharing site, to upload photos of you and your colleagues, for example. People like to see real people, so posting photos of your colleagues brings your brand to life and your audience can see the real people behind your brand.

Using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook are without doubt a superb way to raise brand awareness but it’s important to remember you are using these sites to direct traffic back to your website. Don’t neglect your website because you feel you are getting more of an output from social media – you can create a blog on your website to keep your content fresh and up-to-date. Update your blog with subjects relevant to your brand, news and competitions. Keep blog posts clear and concise and if you are struggling to write relevant information, hire a social media specialist to help you along. Invite your readers to comment on your blog posts and reply to their comments possibly linking to other relevant blog posts, interaction between you and your reader is essential.

Author Bio: Dave Matthews is a freelance copywriter. He writes articles for a range of interests, causes and businesses – in this case, social media marketing.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: social, media, marketing, search, digital