Can Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs really help my business?
Can Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs really help my business
?
In today's society, social networking and media has become more and more of its own living, breathing entity than an internet service. Teenagers spend hour upon hour on Facebook, and more than one celebrity has gotten in trouble for things they have posted on twitter. The dark side of social networking is painfully obvious everywhere you go in the media. With that said, we have all heard the figure of speech "Every cloud has a silver lining", and this silver is pure gold for businesses if you can manipulate Facebook, twitter, and blogs.
Facebook is the bizarre love child of Google and MySpace. Created from the dorm rooms of Harvard, it was originally intended to allow socially awkward and semi-drunken teens to have 'friends' without ever having to deal with a real human being. It became an overnight success with Harvard students, allowing friends with differing schedules to communicate with each other through their internet connections at any given time. Then it blew up. Invented in February of 2004 as a hobby for some college kids to play with, it has now grown (as of statistic published in multiple news articles in July of 2010) to over 500 million active users. This math breaks down in a way that any business should love: Just about one in every 14 or 15 people IN THE WORLD are actively using Facebook. Put in simpler terms, if given the chance, a business has the potential to reach out to 1 in 14 people.
Imagine, if you will, that you are the owner of Gracewinds Music, a small business based out of Corvallis, Oregon. You put yourself on Facebook, and have a couple of your relatives 'like' your page (liking is similar to adding as a friend, but you instead like a business or idea, allowing you to follow and track the progress of it). Then, your cousin has a friend who likes music and plays guitar, so he likes your page also. He can now see anything you wish to post on that page, i.e. coupons, sales and deals, your hours, contact information, or suppliers. Well, this cousin is in a band, and all of his band mates need gear too, and they see he has liked you. Since these kids are in high school, the band members see it too....
By this point you can see where this goes, and more importantly, just how fast a fan base and following of customers can grow. With all of this being totally free, and requiring next to no effort on the part of the business, any business with internet access should definitely look into it. Two good links, the first being for the small business of Gracewinds music, and the latter being Target, are here:
Gracewinds Music and Target
Twitter is a weird creature. When you think of twitter, think of tweety bird. Our little yellow friend liked to fly over here and there around his cage, and whenever something happened, he would tweet as loudly as he could just to get that nefarious cat in trouble. Welcome to twitter! Twitter is an internet service that, when used by the general public, legalizes stalking. How does it legalize stalking? It gives you immediate access to any information someone puts up on twitter.
The user can either follow or be followed. If you are followed, you tweet, or send a text message to, twitter. This message could be as simple as "out to get eggs, be back soon". Seemingly harmless, right? You can also tweet pictures, which has gotten more than one celebrity in trouble. If you are a follower, any 'tweets' someone you are following posts can be sent directly to your phone.
Twitter is amazing for small businesses. Target has what they call the 'daily deal' page, posting links to coupons or hot deals for a limited time directly to all of their follower's phones. Dave Matthews, Sugarland, Paramour, and even Eminem have all given the first x amount of followers to show up with their messages free tickets into their concert. Sugarland specifically has done multiple concerts where the only way to hear about it was if you were a follower on twitter, announcing the time and location of the event about an hour before it happened.
How can you as a business owner use it? Tell your customers you have a twitter, and allow them to look it up and explore on their own. If you set up your page right, they will like what they see and will follow you. Let's say you are a small bakery, you can tweet that you have hot rolls and must sell within the next 2 hours, 99 cents apiece, and watch the floodgates open and the customers pour forth. One prime example happened in my home town:
Cold Stone Creamery had a malfunction causing their freezers to short out at one location, so they tweeted the address, and advertised that anyone showing up before it melted could walk away with 2 gallons for the price of a regularly advertised large. Needless to say they did not have any ice cream go to waste.
The third common marketing tool a business interested in social networking can use is something called a blog. When we were younger, we all knew someone who had a diary of some sort or another where they kept all their secrets. This is what a blog is, if a diary all of the sudden decided to come out of hiding and yell at everyone. A blog is essentially a diary entry used to express opinions, ideas, and concepts. If you watch the cooking network, you will notice that every time there is a competition, one of the judges is a 'food blogger'. This person gets paid to go all over the world and eat, then write what they thought about every minute little detail of the restaurant. Think of a blog writer as a free-lance writer with no one to answer to.
Now let's think of a blogger as a corrupt politician. Grease the gears a little bit and they will vote your way. For a blogger, give them incentives to write your way. It is all a simple matter of doing research on the internet to see who is actively blogging about anything you care about that has nothing to do with teen angst or horrible music, and offer them some form of deal.
There are other forms of social networking, and with just a few minutes on the internet, anyone should be able to have Google find a fair few for them. As a business, shouldn't you always look into the lowest cost way to do things that will yield the highest return? What will yield a higher return than free advertising?
New Guys Marketing Solutions takes all the hassle out of this. With a staff well versed in article writing and internet usage, as well as any and all forms of advertising, the job can be done for you at a low cost. Be it that you wish to have a page or station set up for you, then the reigns turned over, or wanting a day by day administrative monitoring done for you, New Guys are the people for you. We will set up your page; we will bring your customers in. All that is required of you are the minimums:
1) Business information; i.e. address, name, business type
2) Business goal
3) Target Audience
4) A willingness to work with others
New Guys Marketing Solutions doesn't want to be something small to put on your checklist to get through your day. We want to help your business grow to its fullest potential, and to do that, there must be two way communications between your company and NGMS.
New Guys Marketing Solutions; Marketing Strategies that bring results
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