How Social Media Can Impact Your Business

Everyone is talking about the role social media plays for companies online in the UK, and there are lots of opinions about how to do it right.

Recent research conducted by Foresee Results, highlights what the end customer actually thinks about the use of social media by UK companies, how they interact with it and what value they want to get from it.

The analysis found that...

69% of online shoppers use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and You Tube. Of those, 37% have elected to ‘friend’, ‘follow’ or ’subscribe’.
56% of online shoppers frequent Facebook, making it by far the best place to reach consumers in the UK - both because it’s where they already are, and it’s where they want to hear from you.
Among online shoppers who engage in social media, more than 80% are using Facebook.
54% of respondents who ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ companies through social media do so in order to learn about products. Not far behind, 40% of users do it to learn about special deals and options. Only six percent use social media primarily for customer support.
74% of users who interact with companies on social media sites ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ fewer than five companies.

So what do you need to do as a business to generate this type of following? Here are a few tips to get you started...

Link to your social profiles on every relevant website you own

However, don’t plaster your website will social media links if they aren’t relevant to that site and add no value to the visitor. If you are running profiles on various social media sites then add the links into your global navigation.

Don’t be fearful of distraction, not every visitor to your site is there to make a transaction; by giving them an additional source of engagement with your brand you are building relationships and this will help to bring them back when they are ready to do business.

Make sure that your links are visual and keyword optimised, plus add tracking codes to ensure you can measure click through.

Integrate Your Blog Content

The key challenges you face with your blog is in getting people to read it, keep coming back to read more of it and then telling other people about it. To achieve this you need to expose your blog content to the right people and you can use your social presence to help you do this.

Set up your site so that it automatically pushes your blog onto all the social media sites you subscribe to. Enable people to then forward your blog to others to increase the audience exposed to your blog. Add blog links on your profile pages and add a RSS feed to your blog engine. The more you can do towards expanding your blog audience the better – but don’t forget the most important rule – keep writing, up to date blogs for people to follow!

Support Social Bookmarking

Use a free tool like ‘Add This’ to allow people to share your content across their social networks, incorporating this functionality across all product and content pages including your blog posts, videos and photos.

Share Your Photos

Photos are a great way to communicate the value of your brand, your products and your services. They can also create a more informal relationship with your community by providing glimpses of people in your community and showing what you get up to.

Make sure you add photos regularly and that you tag each one to help increase search visibility. Provide links back to photo based content on your site from your social media pages, and if it’s relevant, enable customers to upload photos of their own via your website and add these into the mix.

As with any media, social media requires a different style of marketing. Community members are real genuine people and expect to be treated as such. To effectively market in social media you have to constantly provide value to your community not just blast various marketing messages at them.

So be smart about the content, give people what they want and make sure you have someone to monitor it and post good, timely information. If you obey the rules you will be rewarded by your fans.

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