7 Reasons to Use Social Media to Promote Your Brand

If you think Twitter, Facebook, and other online social media communities are only for teens, you’re missing out on valuable and free marketing platforms for your brand (book, business or product).

Further, if you’re not on social media, you’re risking losing your own potential clients/customers to those smart business people who are utilizing social media.

Which social media platforms you focus on depends a great deal on what your brand is.  Yet no matter what you are promoting, here are seven excellent reasons why you must use social media:

Reason 1:  It’s the most cost-effective online advertising.

The current most popular social media platforms being used for business are free:  Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com.  (LinkedIn does have an upgrade that costs, but it’s not necessary to get this upgrade.)  And this is “relationship” marketing to targeted markets.

“Free” is definitely more cost-effective than spending money on online advertising techniques such as Pay Per Click or banner ads.

Reason 2:  You can have global reach with social media.

The world is now a global marketplace.  Why not reach this global market?  Many of the most popular social media platforms have this global reach, and you can see this clearly illustrated on Twitter.  At any time of day or night you can see real-time “tweets” from people in Japan, England, the U.S., India and many other countries.

For example, if you have a book that might appeal to anyone in the world who reads in English, why limit yourself to just promoting in the U.S.?  Thanks to Amazon these people outside the U.S. can buy your book even if it is only available in U.S. stores.

Reason 3:  You can attract targeted groups of people as potential clients/customers for your brand.

Social media enables you to join groups of people with the same interests and goals.  On LinkedIn and Facebook you can join groups as varied as Children’s Book Writers to eMarketing.

If you choose groups to join based on your brand, you’ll be putting yourself in front of the exact groups of people you want to reach as potential clients/customers.  This can pay off in increased sales for you.

Reason 4:  You can use the community aspect of social media to form your own community.

Once you are active on social media platforms and have people who are your followers (Twitter), your friends (Facebook) and/or your connections (LinkedIn), you can start your own groups of highly targeted interests.

You can create a niche market in your brand, book or business and share your knowledge with others who join your community.  These people can become your loyal followers, friends and connections – and they can help spread your marketing message to their followers, friends and connections.

Reason 5:  You can use social media to establish your expertise.

People like to do business with people they know, like and trust.  By sharing your knowledge for free online with the people in the social media groups you belong to, you can establish yourself as an expert.  This can pay off in increasing potential clients/customers’ trust in you.

And you can also receive invitations for blog “interviews” or BlogTalkRadio show interviews or podcasts.  And these interviews lead to more free exposure for your brand and more free promotion for your expertise.

Reason 6:  You can use social media to find cross-promotional partners.

Amazingly in the world of social media, people who would be considered competitors in the off-line world are teaming up to provide products and services to their combined clients/customers.  And these clients/customers are very responsive to these cross-promotions (often called joint ventures) – especially when introduced to a second expert by a first expert they already know, like and trust.

You and your cross-promotion partner can each get access to the other person’s “list” (the names of interested clients/customers collected at a website) and thus you’ve greatly expanded your potential client/customer pool.

Reason 7:  You can announce updates of your activities with a few keystrokes.

Your updates on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn take seconds – and you’ve announced to your followers, friends and connections what you’re doing or what you’re offering or what you’re speaking on.

And there are even online applications that allow you to update your status across several of your social media accounts at one time (Ping.fm is one of these applications).  So keeping in front of your potential clients/customers is as easy as 1-2-3.

Once you become active yourself on social media platforms, you’ll find many more reasons to promote your brand, book or business on social media in order to attract targeted potential clients/customers.  And you’ll look back at your pre-social media days and wonder how you ever did marketing without using online social media. – P.Z.M.

If you have less time to do the things i would suggest to hire a Digital Marketing Expert.

Four inventive ways to distribute content: Huge Effective for Small Businesses

Post links on your social media channels, obviously. Put a teaser in your email newsletter, of course. Syndicate it through relevant recommendation platforms, OK then.

There are plenty of standard ways to get people to look at the content you publish and they all have their various merits in terms of generating awareness, traffic and leads.

The problem is that they also have their limitations. To really justify the investment you put into creating content, you want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible and often that means a bit of lateral thinking.

Make it part of your delivery process

If you're really invested in being a valuable resource for your audience, the marketing of your content is as important as the marketing of your products and in an ideal world the two would be happily intertwined.

TOMS Shoes provides an excellent example of this. There are a lot of great reasons to buy TOMS. They're comfortable, reasonably priced and for every pair you purchase they'll give a pair to someone who really needs one.

In the box you'll also find ideas of ways you can get involved, one of which is a suggestion to host a screening of their documentary, For Tomorrow.  

It's an inspirational story and a simple way to encourage a regular stream of actively engaged people to help get the content in front of more people.

Consider it as an educational resource

While working for Monster a few years ago I helped put together some animated career advice videos. It was part of a campaign to communicate what can often be a grey topic in a more interesting way.

Soon after posting them, someone from a university in Brazil got in touch to ask if they could play the videos to their class - absolutely!

This got us thinking, every university in the world potentially has a batch of students who want to come to work in the UK, so we started actively marketing the videos to higher education organisations across the globe, using the content as a way to draw in traffic from talented people eager to get a foot on the career ladder.

Remove your branding

Have you heard of Robert Galbraith? You may know him (or her) better as J.K. Rowling - this was the moniker she used when publishing her first non-Harry Potter novel to provide a blank slate to see the real reaction of audiences.

It's something that literary figures have done through the ages and a tactic your brand could also do to see the true value of what you put together.

Everything you produce comes with certain audience preconceptions, so take away everything that connects it to your company, then publicise it somewhere like reddit.com/r/sideproject orlaunchsky.com 

Honest feedback will allow you to go away and develop the polished version that slots into your core website.

Put it on your homepage

This doesn't sound particularly inventive, but you'd be surprised at how many businesses put together lavish content-led campaigns, then fail to publicise it on their most valuable real-estate.

Don't be satisfied with giving it a cursory nod in the corner, put it front and centre.

If it interferes with plans to promote a sale or another commercially vital period, delay the launch until you have a clear window where you can give it the push it deserves. Make sure you involve every team from around the business so everyone gets the importance of what you're doing in relation to the wider business objectives.

In a busy online world where people are bombarded from every direction with things to look at, differentiation is your most valuable weapon.

Integrated campaign planning makes sure this is addressed at the outset and considering distribution early on in the concepting phase means you'll never left with a great creative piece of content, but some very uncreative ways of publicising it. 

What are some of the out-of-the-ordinary ways you've attempted to get a web page noticed?

Source