Social media is a brilliant marketing tool if used correctly. It can work very well for a large number of businesses who are looking to promote their products or services. Most businesses large or small have some sort of social media presence now.

Many businesses struggle to know what sort of things they should be talking about and how often they should be updating their profiles and this all depends on what industry you are in and what information you are sharing. There is always a fine balance that needs to be adhered to in order to get the most out of social media marketing without annoying people by bombarding them with information.

When it comes to “what should you be writing about” then the answer is a mix, you need to send out marketing messages and links to useful information that is relevant to your business but a few updates regarding something funny or interesting that has happened in the office is often a great way to keep your customers engaged.

You may want to manage your social media accounts yourself or you may want to enlist the help of a social media marketing company.

Social media can be of great importance to a business who is looking to market themselves. There are a number of different social media sites out there that have millions of users that interact on a daily (if not more frequently) basis and therefore this avenue of marketing is one that you really should ensure you are using.

But how do you create a buzz on these social media sites and gain followers? There area number of ways in which you can do this but the only real way is to start sharing content that people are interested in. You may want to start by asking friends and family to like your page and share it with their friends. Once you have a few followers you need to share content that will make them want to either comment or share with others. The idea is to give people something that will make them want to come back and read more of your posts, this way you start to build up an audience. Many companies run regular competitions or giveaways to entice people back and this does often seem to work well.

You may want to enlist the help of a social media marketing expert who will be able to either train you on what you need to be doing or manage your profiles for you.

When using social media to market your business it’s important to get a good following of people and bring a good level of traffic through your business social media page.

There are some highly effective simple ways to do this thus boosting your social media presence.

Firstly it’s important to post regular content to your social media ideally things that people will want to share with their friends and family. You need to make sure that the content is relevant to your business but not too pushy or too aggressively sales-like.

A great way of using posts designed to be shared to improve your visibility would be to do things like run competitions through your business where the followers of your page get the chance to win a prize simply by sharing a post. This means each person on their friend list will also see the post helping with brand recognition.

You can also share posts to do with humour or current affairs that your followers may find interesting however this should always be done with caution as you don’t want to cause offence or any damage to your brand if your followers don’t like the post. This method of using social media can be very effective as you can end up with many shares in a short space of time.

Do you already have a firm marketing budget in place? If so how much of that should you be putting towards social media marketing? We explore the budgets that small to medium businesses should be investing and what response you are likely to get from it.
According to Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, marketers are allocating close to 10% of their budgets to social media marketing. This means if you have a budget of £10,000 per year for all your marketing then at least £1000 of that should go to social media, but this is not a lot when you split it up over monthly amounts. To get someone to work on your social media profiles you will probably have to look at putting at least £150- £200 a month towards it to be able to get some results. Too little budget will simply be lost and may give you very little rewards. If you are going to be doing the social media marketing yourself then you may be able to allocate this budget to just use on paid for social media ads rather than accounting for your time. Some experts suggest that it should be more like 25% of your total budget is invested in social media marketing especially in business to consumer industries.
Social media networks have evolved, from being platforms where you meet new friends – to a business hub – a way to promote brand awareness, share blog posts, encourage user content, and increase income.

Social media is being used more and more by businesses who are wanting to increase their presents online and also to get referring traffic to their website. One of the many advantages of social media is that it is free but if you want to go the extra mile then you may consider doing some paid for advertising such as Facebook ads.

The great thing with the paid for advertising is that you can tailor your ads to create a specific group of people to show it to. This allows you to keep control of your budget and ensure your ad is only showing to people it may be relevant to. If for example you had a product that was most relevant to people between the ages of 18-35 then you could create them as your target group. You can also narrow it down to only show to certain geographical locations.

When using social media to build up traffic to your site, you need to give people a reason to click on a link that is directed through to a page on your main website. This may be a competition where people have to complete their details on your site or you can give someone a few lines of an article and allow them to read the rest of it on your site.