KEY TAKEAWAY – There are many free channels you can use to engage with your new prospects online. You should be using ALL of them, including LinkedIn and Twitter.
LinkedIn and Twitter round out the top 4 social media websites you’ll want to use to market your business with.
LinkedIn is to business professionals what Facebook is to families and friends. LinkedIn is where business people congregate, connecting with each other to collaborate, share ideas, develop joint ventures, and even look for jobs.
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Just as with the other social media sites, you must set up a personal profile first in LinkedIn before you can set up a business Page for your company.
Once your business page is up & running, you can upload pictures, video, slideshows and other information about your business to help inform prospects about you.
Not only is a LinkedIn profile and business page helpful in attracting new prospects, but just having a link in your profile back to your website is a powerful authority signal to Google, helping your website’s ranking.
Unlike the others, though, LinkedIn leans more toward B2B (business-to-business) interaction & professional networking.
LinkedIn, too, has its own Pay-Per-Click ad system like Google & Facebook which you can use to reach new business audiences.
Like Facebook, LinkedIn’s ads are shown to your target audience based on the demographic & sociographic data your campaign uses.
A Basic account is free. If you’re bootstrapping your marketing, your personal profile and business page together make a great marketing combination in LinkedIn.
Twitter rounds out the 4 top social media sites you should use to promote your business.
Twitter allows you to quickly send, or “tweet”, messages of up to 140 characters to people who subscribe to, or “follow”, your Twitter account.
Similar to SMS or text messaging, it’s a quick way to blast out a brief message to your Followers. You can include links to other websites, documents, images or video, and share valuable content with them.
Make sure all your company info is in your Twitter profile – especially your website address and phone number – to help people find your business.
Twitter also offers various marketing and advertising tools to help you target the most qualified prospects and drive them to your website.
As we become more and more “net-centric” in our interactions with each other, social media will continue to play a larger and larger part in our overall online experience.
Google rewards those that do – the more “social signals” your web properties generate, the more relevant Google thinks you are, and again, the higher it will rank you.
Social signals include getting Likes, attracting Followers, seeing Friends post quality content on your blog or webpage, you posting content to attract new visitors to your online properties, and other indications of social activity.
Google is slowly changing its search algorithm to boost the rankings of websites around whom a lot of social activity is occurring.
So cast as wide a net as you can, and use social media smartly to help you attract the most qualified prospects to your company.
NEXT UP: We’ll examine why it’s so important that your online marketing assets be “mobile friendly”.
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