There can be no doubt that marketing on sites like, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn drives a huge audience to your service or product. Social media marketing is big business. It’s all about attracting customers directly to your company or website. One day you can be posting video of a product, by the end of day it may have gone viral: posted and viewed worldwide.
You can’t ignore social media. Here is a highly effective and fast means of promotion. For lots of companies it’s already overtaken TV, print and radio advertising. It costs not a penny to establish a Facebook or Twitter account. Once done, you can share photos, maps, news, video, events and their invitations in double quick time.
Many companies already blog and it’s simple to link your blog to the many available platforms. That way, every time you post anew, it gets instantly linked to Twitter and also Facebook, driving their users straight to your blog. But a blog by itself is no longer enough. It’s can be easier and quicker broadcast directly from your Facebook account which is totally WYSIWYG, rather than fiddle about with all that pesky HTML blog coding.
Twitter is slightly more complicated as you need to type in just 140 characters which contain a bespoke tiny URL leading to the external page you want to promote. So it’s a bit more work, and you still need an external site to link to. However you can’t ignore the millions of users who rather use Twitter than any other community.
Those in the restaurant, real estate, tours or vacation industry have found social media marketing an absolute boon. You can post pictures, prices, videos, special offers, news updates, menus and whatever else you can think of, right there, on Facebook. But be careful: some try to promote their service within popular groups, where advertising is actually against the rules. Stick to your page or buy a side ad rather than upsetting group users and Facebook itself by advertising where it is not allowed.
All businesses should consider a video channel on YouTube, especially if products sell visually. A walk through of a house, holiday resort or RV for example is great for potential customers. The numbers are staggering. YouTube has 490 million users watching 2.9 billion hours of video every month. 400 Tweets containing YouTube links are posted each minute. 150 years’ worth of video is watched on Facebook each day.
The key to success is to build a community to whom you can regularly promote. People who either follow you on Twitter, Like and Subscribe to you on Facebook and subscribe to your YouTube Channel. To attract and retain these customers, you need to keep your content timely, regularly updated, useful, interesting and/or fun. Some of the most successful social media campaigns are those which go viral: people like them so much, they share them everywhere.
The quirky and novel works when it comes to social media marketing. No-one who has seen the ‘Where the hell is Matt?’ video will forget it, and neither will Matt’s sponsors as the video has exposed them to 42 million unique views. Even the world’s longest established, mega corporations now know that original, unusual video and photos are capable of capturing global audiences in a moment via social media marketing. buy youtube shares