50 Ways To Use Social Media
Here are 50 ways to use social media to grow your business.
1) Social Bookmark Links – Improve sharing by incorporating social bookmark links to your
most important web pages and/or blog posts.
2) Social Profiles – Build buzz that leads up to the holidays by using your social profiles.
People often only start as holidays are happening. Start early and build up the buzz to
the holidays in your social profiles.
3) Good Content – People want to share compelling, inspiring, educational and valuable
content. Produce great content which are interesting and it will automatically be shared
virally online.
4) Writing Blog Content – Content is crucial to kickstart a successful social media campaign.
Write blog content that is catered for your target audience and what your community
wants to know about.
5) Branding – Use social media to enhance your branding. Design a seasonal branded
image to match across all social networks and the company site.
6) Be consistent – Update your content regularly and consistently. People tend to keep
coming back to a site if they know that the site is frequently updated with new content.
7) Craft Compelling Headlines – When promoting your content on social media networks,
craft headlines that interest people such that they want to read the rest of your article.
8) Evaluation and Measurement – Track and measure social media ROI by analyzing how it
performs compared to more established channels or advertising methods. Compare the
quality of traffic they drive to your website and the conversion rates.
9) Metadata and Tagging – Metadata is data which is a description of the characteristics of
a piece of information. Tags can be terms or keywords that are assigned to particular
resource. Tagging and incorporating other metadata can help improve searching and
measure the spread of information.
10) Popular Lists – ‘List’ posts tend to get passed around online very quickly. An example will
be the “Top 50 ways to make money online”.
11) Combine Social Media with Traditional Marketing – Include social media profile
addresses on printed advertising materials like brochures, fliers, newspaper ads, etc.
12) Retweet Buttons On Blog Posts – Locate and install WordPress plugins that enable you
to place a Retweet button on your blog at the top of all your posts.
13) Community platforms – Build up community platforms like forums, fanpages, groups
and etc. around real communities of shared interest and keep the conversation going.
14) Microsite – Build a microsite that encompasses all of your social and overall marketing
efforts. This site can contain a hyper-focused campaign as well.
15) Facebook Share Button – Locate and install WordPress plugins that enable you to place
a Facebook share button on your blog at the top of all posts
16) Be Careful When Using Hashtags On Tweets – Studies have found that hashtag-stuffing
caused 5% fewer click-throughs.
17) Facebook Like Box – Add a Facebook ‘like box’ near to the top right side of your blog /
website. In this way, people can ‘like’ your Facebook page even while they are on your
blog / website.
18) Having More Followers Than Following – Having more followers than following on your
Twitter account enhances your Twitter influence and thus adds to your Twitter
account’s SEO potential.
19) Posting Useful Content – Avoid aggressively pushing your products or services on your
social profiles although it may be the holiday season. Rather, post useful content on
your social profiles and think about how to help the people on your network to get
through the busy holiday season. In this way, people tend to trust you more and like you
more hence increasing the chances of them converting to buyers and customers.
20) LinkedIn Share Button – Locate and install WordPress plugins that enable you to place a
LinkedIn share button on your blog at the top of all posts.
21) Online Community – Build a substantial online community by asking for feedback,
offering prizes and giveaways, and actually saying “thank you” for their interactions,
mentions, and contributions of good content.
22) Advice And Tips – Give advice and tips on your topic’s challenges. You can do this by
providing short tips on Twitter (using a branded hashtag). After which stream these
tweets into a dedicated Facebook tab, and expand on these tips by creating tutorial
videos for YouTube.
23) Blog Commenting – Make a connection with influential bloggers in your niche by
commenting regularly on their blogs and posts.
24) Benefit-oriented Content – When writing a blog post, share about the problems that
your product or service is able to solve. No one actually cares about what is your
product or service and their features, they are more interested in what your product or
service can do for them.
25) Conduct Polls – Research by polling people about what are the biggest challenges they
face. After which, look at how your own product or service can help them and
communicate that to them.
26) Tell Stories – Marketing is like storytelling and your customers are just like the
characters in the story. Craft content that motivates your customers or readers. Let their
actions, wants, and needs drive the story.
27) Influential Bloggers In Your Niche – Find which bloggers are most influential in your
niche and learn how they got their influence through their content and social media
efforts. Imitate and implement.
28) Creating a Personable Image – Post and share photos of your company parties, or your
participation in charitable events. This brings the company to a personal and amicable
level with your readers and customers. People nowadays value that personal touch.
29) Email Subscribe – Make usability of your website easy for people. For example, simplify
the process it takes for someone to subscribe to your updates via email. You can use an
autoresponder account like: http://www.aweber.com
30) Show Some Discretion In Sharing – Being personal draws people to you but there is a
need to show some discretion when doing so. Always stay professional and positive in
the portrayal of your online social profiles. Avoid depressing tweets, vague tweets,
humblebrag tweets and etc.
31) Audio And Video – Create a short series of audio podcasts or video podcasts as content
marketing.
32) Think Long Term – Create content for the long term and envision keywords with next
year in mind. This is so that your subject can enjoy ‘longevity’ with your readers.
33) Guest Post – Write to influential bloggers in your niche and request to do a guest post
on their blogs. Craft an agreement that encompasses them to provide a link back to your
blog.
34) Answer Simple Questions – Think about these questions: Who am I speaking to? What
do they want from me online? And cater your content accordingly.
35) Talking About The Weather – People like to talk about the weather where they are at. So,
pay attention to the weather where your customers are located and sensitively consider
this when posting content.
36) Social Media Subscribe Buttons – Place social media subscribe buttons such as Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn etc. in a visible place on your website / blog so that readers can follow
you on your social media networks.
37) Tweeting Blog Posts – When you publish a new blog post on your website or blog, post
several tweets of that post and track the conversions of different times and keywords
you use. In this way, you can evaluate what times of the day, which keywords are
optimized for conversions. (Note: Please take note to include tweets that are of value
and non-promotional in between these blog post tweets.)
38) Flickr and/or YouTube Groups – Build media for your events by experimenting with
Flickr and/or Youtube.
39) RSS Subscription Button – RSS feeds is a powerful medium to push your new blog posts
to people in their ‘Google Reader’ accounts or other reader accounts. Hence, provide a
subscription button via RSS so people know that your blog or website is updated and
new contents are published.
40) The Secret Of Retweets – Tweets referring to the author himself or herself have been
shown to get fewer retweets than other information. Hence, share more relevant and
good information that is not about yourself. Retweets drive traffic to your blog posts
and can boost SEO. Start generating quality content on Twitter that helps you connect
you with more followers.
41) Staff Blogs – Get your staff to start personal blogs on their personal interests. This is so
that they can have a feel of what it would be like to promote, drive traffic to a particular
website and etc.
42) Fine-tune Your Strategy – Test out different techniques on different social networks and
determine what type of content your readers are responding to.
43) Blog Updates On Facebook Page – Once you have published new blog posts to your blog,
update it to your Facebook ‘Page’. There are programs that do that for you
automatically, ie. Networked blogs
44) Social Media Campaign Plan – Plan out an integrated social media promotion project
that incorporates blogging, use of commercial social networks, and a face-to-face event
to build leads and drive awareness of a product or service.
45) Thematic Pictures – Post interesting and cute pictures that revolve around a theme and
share it on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook etc. For example, Halloween
theme – Pets in Halloween costumes.
46) Ask For A Response – After posting cute thematic pictures on your social network, start
a conversation with your followers by asking them questions relating to the theme. For
example, what their best Halloween costume was as a child, and ask them to share a
photo as well.
47) Facebook Page – Share content and links on your Facebook page that will make your
fans want to share and like your updates.
48) Measuring Social Media Metrics – Take a step back and think about why you are
tweeting this information, or why you have a Facebook Page. Is it because you want
sales? Then measure conversion rates. Is it for market research?
49) Live Videos – Conduct live interviews, online talk shows and etc. with uStream.tv and
Mogulus, or Qik on a cell phone. Such sessions become viral very fast.
50) Contests And Competitions – Create competitions or contests on social media networks
such as Twitter, Facebook etc. to conjure up buzz surrounding your company products
or services.
You can learn so much about running a business by reading about other businesses and the things they did right, and what they did wrong.
Just because these are very big businesses, the issues raised in these articles are totally relevant to you in your carpet cleaning business. The causes of failures of the big players in industry can and do apply to small businesses.
For example, you will read that Kodak actually invented the digital camera but didn’t think it would take off until they were so far behind the curve they simply couldn’t catch up. In your carpet cleaning business this could mean it may be worth looking at increasing your service lines or keeping up to date with new innovations or trends.
Every business can learn so much from the failures of others, and you may be surprised at the silliest mistakes made by the business elite.