The internet and Social Media have given entrepreneurs an incredible opportunity to put their offer in front of thousands, if not millions, of highly targeted customers, and often for little to no cost.
This has given small business entrepreneurs the ability to compete with large corporations on a much more level playing field. Even if you’re a stay-at-home mom running a home business on the side, or a real estate agent looking for potential clients, Social Media has the potential to make your business explode in a relatively short amount of time.
So here are 5 ways for you to boost exposure for your business on Social Media…
1) Start A Blog
In a world where offers for fast, easy money fly at you with every click of a mouse, the people who are actually bringing in the big bucks are the ones who are providing quality content.
People don’t surf the internet to get bombarded by ads and offers. People are on the internet for one reason – to consume content. And blogs are a great way to inform and educate your audience with content that they want and are looking for.
The problem with blogs is that everyone and their grandmother has one. So how do you get yours to be seen by the people who would be most interested in what you’re marketing?
One word…SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A good SEO strategy is what will get your blog ranking on the first page of Google results when someone searches for a relevant term.
SEO involves things like keyword research, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, backlinking, and other tactics that will get your blog posts noticed by Google and ranking high in the search results.
Now, a good SEO strategy is important, but even if you’ve got the best SEO in the world, it will take time for your blog to rank. To get immediate exposure, post your blog posts to relevant Facebook and Google+ groups as well as other social media sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Blogger, Tumblr, etc.
2) Start A YouTube Channel
YouTube is perhaps one of the most overlooked and underrated Social Media platforms for promoting your business and products. What most people don’t realize about YouTube is that it isn’t just a video sharing site. It is actually the 2nd most popular search engine in the world (behind Google) and processes 3 billion searches a month – more than Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL combined.
And just like a blog, in order to get your YouTube videos in front of a relevant audience, you need to know SEO. The good news is that if you learn blog SEO, YouTube SEO is almost identical.
There are some unique tricks you can use with YouTube to increase the “relevancy” of your videos, such as including your keyword in the closed captioning and in annotations, but the basics between blog and YouTube SEO are pretty much the same.
Again make sure you’re posting your YouTube videos to relevant Facebook groups and other social media sites for immediate exposure and traffic.
3) Start A Facebook “Likes” Campaign
Facebook is where everyone seems to want to be right now, and for good reason…with about 1.5 billion active monthly users each spending an average of 20 minutes per day on the site, Facebook is a potential goldmine for any business seeking to reach a relevant audience.
The downside to trying to market your business on Facebook is that it is very difficult to get exposure for your business without paying for advertising. Without advertising, there are strict limits on how many people you can message, how many groups you can post to, and how many friend requests you can make.
Break these rules, and Facebook is known to permanently shut down your account.
A “Likes” campaign is a method of increasing exposure for your business’s Fan Page by paying Facebook to put an ad for your Fan Page in the newsfeed of people who would most likely be interested in what you’re offering.
For example, if you’re a local pizza restaurant, you can have Facebook target people who like other local pizza restaurants in your area.
If you sell women’s fitness gear, you can target women between the ages of 12 and 50 who have an interest in sports and fitness.
The more “targeted” you get, the more qualified and interested your audience will be.
4) Have You Considered Instagram?
Instagram is in a golden-zone right now…a bunch of active, responsive users and it hasn’t been ruined (yet) by a ton of marketers spamming their offer to everyone.
I could go into detail about how to become an overnight marketing legend on Instagram, but this post is already getting to be too long, so I’ll just direct you to this Free Webinar that will give you all the details about how we used Instagram to make our business take off.
5) Don’t Forget Twitter!
Oh yeah…Twitter. I almost forgot.
For the most part, I’ve found Twitter to be just a big shoutbox, with everyone talking and few people listening. But if you get creative in how you reach people and provide them with some quality content, it can be a great way to generate customers for your business.
On Twitter, it’s customary for people to follow you back when you follow them. So one great strategy is to use an app like Crowdfire, Tweepi, or Unfollowers to “copy the followers” of your competitors.
For example, if you’re a musician trying to promote your newest single, you can “copy the followers” of other musicians in the same genre and make them your followers.
Apps like Crowdfire, Tweepi, and Unfollowers allow you to see who you have followed and who is following you back. So after a few days go by, you can unfollow anyone who hasn’t followed you.
You can follow up to 1000 people per day, so this method can generate several thousands of genuine, active, targeted followers in a fairly short amount of time. If you work this method every day and max out your followers, you should gain somewhere between 100 and 300 followers every day.
Comments
Post a Comment