First Steps to Promoting Your Business Using Social Media

You want to market your business using social media. This time you’re hoping it will take your business to the next level. In this article we will explore what you need to do to start marketing your business into the social mediasphere, from the basics up.

Familiarize yourself with social media

Social media is everywhere nowadays. The first step is always to familiarize yourself with the market. Start by creating accounts and contributing to social media. Make sure to stop by facebook.com, wikipedia.org, stumbleupon.com, digg.com and linkedin.com (to name a few – there are more make sure to explore others as well). Once you create an account prepare to actually participate. When I say that I don’t just mean check the sites out, I mean comment and contribute. You are going to need to contribute without any alterative motives. No posting about your own business just to get a link.

The next thing you need to do is sign up for some RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, so you can keep current on everything that is happening. Before you do that you are going to need a feed reader, so you can save time and have the posts come to you. My suggestion would be Google Reader, it’s web based and easy to use.

To sign up for Goggle Reader all you have to do is go to www.google.com/reader/ and sign in using your Google Account from there you can enter the urls of your favorite blog’s RSS feed. Or find some interesting blogs and then click add to Google Reader. The best advice I can give is start with some authority blogs in your industry and then once you get started with them you can add more, but don’t overwhelm yourself.

Start playing in the social media playground

Have a blog? A web site? Well if you don’t have a web site or a blog. You can stop reading this article or you can get a blog if a web site is out of your budget. Blogs are easy to install. There are a few options.

Blogger is free and can be either hosted on your domain or on a sub-domain at Blogger. They have some templates for you use but they are limited. Word press is another option. The downfall is Word press must be hosted on your own domain, thus meaning you would need a server. Word press seems to be more marketed towards intermediate bloggers. The advanced options are Moveable Type and Type Pad. These options are only recommend for advanced bloggers whom can customize the blog themselves.

If you are new to social media and blogging, start with Blogger. You can always move your blog to your own domain once you get more acquainted. Now the key to blogging is to share your expertise. Blog about things you are an expert in (not how you walk the dog at 7am every morning – no one is interested in when you walk your dog). Make your blog a resource for your visitors and provide useful information. For example my blog (below) is targeted to be a resource for small business web site owners.

Make yourself linkable and likeable

Social media is like marketing online – that’s the easiest way to explain it. You need to first be polite and contribute to the social mediasphere. Once you have done that – you need to make sure people can reach you.

First step to make sure a valid email address is available on your blog or web site and that you make yourself approachable. Encourage people to contact you with questions or comments about your posts. Also, make sure comments are enabled in your blog. If you post much content on your web site, make sure you adding the book marking buttons to your web site These buttons enable web site or blog visitors to quickly add your article to digg, facebook, stumble upon and more social media web site with just one click. An excellent place to get your book marking buttons is www.addthis.com . They make it easy all you have to do is copy the code and place it where you want your button to appear.

Not only does this it make it easy for your visitors to promote your expertise it’s throws your blog/web site into the social media arena. The buttons allow visitors to interact with your web site, without a lot of programming.

The rest is up to you

In this article, we have set you up with all the right tools, given you some advice on how to navigate the social mediasphere and now it is all up you to create something people want to link to, something people are interested in – something viral. It’s up to you to create a great product or a great service.

Article by:

Alicia Harper

Vancouver Web Design Company

Small Business Web site Owner Blog