How much interaction is too much on social media?

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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.

How to expand your geographical reach online

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If you are a business owner there may come a time when you want to start growing the business and reach out to other geographical locations. Many businesses that offer services, tend to start marketing to their local towns and villages and then over time branch out further to the bigger cities and possible even other countries. Depending on what business you are in will vary how easy or difficult this is to do.  There are many ways in which you can do this, and ideally you want to explore a few different marketing avenues to gain the best possible results. 

Firstly you should look at your website and find out currently which areas you perform well in. This can be done manually by searching on Google and Bing etc to see where you rank for your keywords or you may opt to buy some software that will do these searches for you. It may be that you only have one location mentioned on your site, in which case you will struggle to rank for other places. If this is the case then you need to create additional content talking about the products or services that you offer in other areas you wish to target.

Understanding website statistics and what to look out for

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There are hundreds of website statistic tracking tools available for you to use to see how many people are visiting your site. The information you can extract from the software depends entirely on which one you use and often people opt to use two of three to get a better picture of what is really happening.

If you use Google Analytics, this can be very easy for someone who is not clued up on web marketing to understand. You can add the main information you wish to see on the front dashboard and even have the data emailed to you on a regular basis. But if you are in to marketing then there is a lot more in there that you can extract.

One thing to always look out for is a sudden unexplained peak in traffic. When you start to analyse the stats you may find that they have all come from one referring site and you have a very high bounce rate.. This is often spam bots which are essentially programs that are written that then send out spiders to crawl certain websites (they are not actually human visitors). This can serious effect the reliability of your data. You can set up filters to remove this information which I strongly advise you do so you can get a clear view of what is really happening in terms of traffic.

Making sure you track your marketing efforts

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Marketing is essential to any business for it to succeed. As marketing can be so vast, it is important to keep track of where you are investing your marketing budget to check that it is giving you a health return on your investment.

When doing any form of online or offline marketing it is important to track the number of enquires or sales, this will help you decide about future investments. Some marketing avenues work well for one type of business and not so well for another, so you often need to trial it before you can see if it is right for you.  

If you set up an ad in a magazine or newspaper or do a leaflet drop then you may wish to set up a new phone number that is only used on this promotion. This will allow you to see how many people are enquiring due to that marketing.

Online marketing is often a little easily to track with the like of Google analytics which can show you where the visitor has come from i.e social media site, Google Adwords etc.

How to make social media work for you

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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.