Social media has become the most powerful tool for promoting your small business. This is great for the small business, because social media is free. Get exposure for your small business without spending a fortune on advertising, using these 5 easy tips.
1 – Viral Giveaways
People love free products and services. Hold a giveaway. Create an image promoting the giveaway of a product or service, post it on your social media outlet (i.e. Facebook), and state that participants must like your page and share this image to be entered into the giveaway. Most potential customers will do this in a heartbeat, since it only takes a second of their time.
In doing this, you are having your business virally advertised by expanding your outreach. People will share from other people and the giveaway will continue on farther than your initial base of followers, bringing more traffic to your social media site.
Wait about a month to pick a winner, and you will find that your followers have exponentially grown. All of your posts will then be available to your new following base, some of which will inevitably become new customers of yours. The free product or service will be a mere fraction of the cost of what you would have had to pay for advertising to such a large and diverse base of individuals.
2 – The Proof Is In the Picture
Invite happy customers to share photos of their selves using your product or service. Post them. People love the recognition of being shared to an audience, and potential customers will be more eager to try your products or services if they see that others have been so significantly pleased with them.
People take comfort in seeing that other people actually use and enjoy your business. They’re more likely to go to you if they can see that other people do, and are happy that they did.
3 – Hashtags
Create a hashtag. Hashtags, usually small, spaceless phrases beginning with the “#” symbol, are a way to relate a group of tweets back to one concept. Over time, if your customers and potential customers use them, it will allow you to keep track of public opinion.
If the hashtag is humorous or clever in any way, that makes it more likely to be used.
4 – Offer Incentives for Reviews
If you offer a great product or service, you need to have reviews to back it up. Unfortunately, people are far more likely to talk about a negative experience with a business than they are to share their positive experience. Make it worth people’s while to review you online. There is a multitude of ways to do this.
You can offer a small discount on the customer’s next purchase with you, such as 5%, for publicly posting a review of their product(s) or service(s) that you provided. Potential customers will be less hesitant about choosing you if they can read these reviews and the small discount will be more than made up for by the influx of new business. This method works best for smaller businesses with a small, specific target audience that need the repeat business to succeed, and people are more likely to come back to you if they know they’ll be receiving a small discount.
Alternatively, you can select one reviewer each month to award a complimentary product or service to. This makes every review like a raffle ticket. This method works best for businesses that want to target as many people as possible. People love winning things, and potential free stuff is a great way to get everyone eager to talk about you.
5 – Ask, And You Shall Receive
Ask for opinions about your products and services publicly. If you ask for an opinion on the Internet, everyone has one and everyone can’t wait to give it to you. Ask what people like, what they don’t like, and what can be better.
People are more inclined to give their money to a business that they feel listens to their wants and needs in a product or service. If you come across as genuinely eager to be the best and having everyone’s interests in your heart, you will immediately stand in the front of people’s minds.
Take these opinions, and apply as many of them as you can, in a way that will not financially damage or compromise the integrity of your business. If past, current, and potential future customers see that you’re listening to them and remain in tune with their desires, they will much prefer you to your competitors that don’t put as much, if any, focus on that.
Once again the good thing about social media is the free nature yet it doesn’t make it easy to use for small business purposes. Thus, having known about best social media tips for small business from experienced people are good choice for you to have. So what do you think?Are you having more social media tips for small business? or may be you like to say something about it? Please share us your comments 🙂
This is a guest post by Andrew Scherer
About guest blogger:
Andrew Scherer is an SEO Expert. You can find more of his work at the Orlando SEO company’s official website.