According to Hubspot, the optimum time of day to post or to tweet something is 4 p.m. on a Friday. So, even right now, social media is working for you, as everyone else who works for you heads out for the weekend. What does this say about Twitter and other social media sites, and what they could do for your business?
MSN’s Business on Main offers seven answers to some of the most popular questions on social media marketing. If anything, those doing social media marketing notice an increase in business exposure, website traffic, search engine rankings, and social-media-generated qualified leads. Social media may seem like something that’s for fun and not for business, but statistics show that people like doing business with businesses that have a strong social media presence.
Yes, social media marketing is much more than having a Facebook page and a Twitter account. They need to be active aspects of your marketing strategy, much like any other aspect of that strategy. Social media marketing isn’t like direct mail or other traditional forms of marketing, where you just put it out there and wait for something to happen. You don’t just put a website out there and that’s it. You keep revisiting it, improving it, adapting it to your customer’s needs. Like the website, you need to be proactive with social media, and not reactive.
And social media can be used for more than marketing your business, it can also be used for recruiting new employees, as we recently covered on Smallbiztechnology.com. It can also be used as a customer service tool, as according to the New York Times, people are more inclined to make a purchase from a business that has answered their question on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter, are you answering customer questions? Do you use it regularly enough to give the impression that you would? No one would ask a question to a business that hasn’t tweeted in a few months.
In 2010, advertisers spent $1.7 billion dollars on social media marketing. Social media is here to stay, so ignoring it and what it could mean for your small business won’t be beneficial any longer.
Smallbiztechnology.com, published by