I am pretty sure many of you agree if social media has a particular role for business purposes. Many advantages you can have from social media whether for marketing, selling, branding, or other advantages you can take from it.

No matter what the platform is the reason is the users. As you may know there are millions of social media users. This mean, there are many chances provided by those social media platforms if you know exactly how to embrace them.

Social Media Fever

After several times reading about related topics, I have found the common reason on why people embrace facebook, twitter, or other social media platforms are :

– Personal Branding ;
– Content Marketing ;
– Traffic or
– Enhance your influence on the net.

I can’t discuss on every single blog or website on the net, but let’s take a look on some of those experts who take advantages from it.

Example of JohnPaulAguiar and Copyblogger :

If you talking about the advantage of twitter and you have a huge followers just like John Paul Aguiar did, then I believe your online business efforts on that matters will be easy than before, even though the total amount of your followers is not a guarantee for your success.

John Paul has a huge amount of twitter followers that they are a great sources of blog monetization. And when you talk about how to use twitter for business, people will pay heed to you because you have a lot of followers which is essentials to build online business.

John Paul  is one of the experts that know how to use twitter for business purposes.

What about copyblogger? I said that copyblogger is one of the experts in online marketing. The author know exactly how to influence the online business environment. Most of their contents are always shared at least 100 tweets. One of their posts even reached 2,219 tweets.

So … what actually you can do with social media to support your business? My opinion is just one … “to sell”. Yes, this is actually what a business is all about, you have to sell.

What ever your cause when starting an online business, the essence is you are selling something whether place for like-minded community, regular information update, special subscription, build a fan base, affiliates sale, advertisement banner, promotional post, blog contest or promote your own product.

For your success, you need to know what your audiences want. To find this, you need to know your audiences, personally, if that possible. You can start to give free content to your readers, at least many have said so.

Once you have an adequate regular audience then all you have to do is begin your marketing campaign. I have a valuable lesson from Mavis Nong about content marketing in social network. She stated that “people will buy from you effortlessly when their needs match your offer and you don’t need to convince them that you have the best offer on the planet “ , and I agree on her insight.

The Social Media Lessons for Business

Here are some important things you can consider :

1. Cost and benefit

When you talk about cost it can be in term of money but for private entrepreneur it can also mean the time waste. So if you are private entrepreneur you are going to need time management. You have to know what you want to get from social media (it can be branding, building consumer trust, enhancing visibility, or else).

2. Know your audience personally

I like the way Gregory Ciotti develop his music blog (sophistefunk) using email to build a network. This might be useful for you too;

3. Be a human

I have this lesson from Mavis Nong, when you engage in social media be a human and treat other users as human too. People don’t want to be forced to buy anything, people will buy from you effortlessly if you have what they need.

4. Be generous to help

I have learned this one from John Paul Aguiar. He taught me that if I want to make money online so don’t pursue the money, but provide assistance as much as you can and the money will come. Provide a valuable and helpful contents within your social media environment.

5. Focus on what work best for you

This one come from my experience. What works on other people not automatically work on you. So … you need to be wise and smart here to absorb all the valuable possibility and then measure which one is best to support your business goal.

That’s all my insight toward social media for business today. So if you have more valuable lesson to share about social media development, I will be more than happy to hear it from you, please share your insight in comments box below.