If your business sells to consumers, then how can you make use of social networking websites to help promote your business? This guide gives practical examples of how to use a business profile to help build more sales.

Social networking has been one of the fastest growing sectors of the internet in recent years. These free to use community sites help consumers stay in touch with their friends, and are surprisingly addictive. The original first generation of social networking sites are now huge, and newer niche social networking sites for different audiences, interests and even geographic regions are now starting to emerge.

But many business owners still haven’t got to grips with how to use this powerful new audience to promote their business.

Most consumer-facing social networking sites allow you to create a profile page for your business; some are free and others will make a small charge. Your profile will usually include photos, a brief description, and contact details for your business. Some sites even let you set up a regular feed of news from your website, add message boards for users to comment on, upload videos about your business and send messages to your followers.

Once your profile is set up, other users can choose to become followers or friends of your business, either by finding you in search results, or virally by word of mouth. You can also promote your social networking profiles with a badge on your main website.

Once you’ve got a social networking profile, you can start to make use of this powerful new marketing tool, in a number of different ways:

Find new customers for your business Social networking can help you spread the word about your business. Social networking works by letting users share what they are up to with their friends, and because they are friends it is likely they’ll be interested in the same things as well. So when a social networking user becomes a fan or follower of your business, all their friends will find out about it as well, and this type of viral marketing is probably one of the most cost effective forms of marketing there is.

Communicate easily with customers or followers: Most social networking sites allow you to contact users who’ve chosen to follow you. This can be a quick and cost effective way to stay in touch with people, and also avoids your emails being caught by spam filters as messages are broadcast within the social networking site. Of course you shouldn’t abuse this facility be messaging people every day, and so messages are best saved for genuine news and offers.

Promote your latest special offers or deals: Social networking sites are a great environment in which to promote special offers or deals. Because social networking sites operate a ‘closed community’ you can send out better offers than normal which cant be seen by the rest of the world. This also makes it easier to track responses. And because social networking users are usually highly active, sending an offer to your group of followers can be a quick and easy way to drum up extra sales.

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