Can social networking really be an effective way to market a business?

I know social networking is very popular these days, especially among teenagers and young millenials. I wanted to know if it can really be an effective way to market a business.

Thanks!

 

Well, the teenagers definitely make up a large % of them, but don't think you're limited to marketing to only that one generation. Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn are a gold mine for the 35+ year old crowd. As well as all of the others if you have a plan to target the right people.

Most of my social media promotion is fully automated now thanks to FollowLiker. I spend maybe an hour a week tweaking my settings and checking up on the accounts... The bots do it all for me and believe me, social media can drive you a TON of traffic.

Take a look at Taco Bell for example...
Twitter.com/TacoBell
TacoBell.tumblr.com ...These 2 links will show you first hand how even a nasty old fast food taco restaurant can use social media to benefit their business.

What is your main source of traffic right now if you don't mind me asking? Just search engines/blogging/PPC maybe? I find it incredible how so many people out there are running successful professional online businesses without having ever used social media to help them promote themselves. I don't even like to think about where my business would be right now without it.

 

BranTheMan makes a great point.

First thing to do is make sure you have a sales funnel set up. You won't be able to sell anything if you are just driving random social traffic.

Next- Social is like gasoline to the fire. Use it to drive massive amounts of users to your sales funnel. Just make sure you target correctly. It's easy to spend a ton of money on social networks if you don't target well. Better to error on the side of too small a subset, than too large. That way you can tweak and grow your roi.

Reverse Engineer everything! Who is your customer?-> Who do they follow?-> Connect with their influencers!

Hope that helps!

 

Been tweeting for a while now (https://twitter.com/qwikad). Twitter will give you a lot of random traffic that won't convert. I use it extensively, every day, but I don't believe that's enough to achieve some kind of good ROI (unless you have a huge follower base, like in the hundreds of thousands).

G+ is great (have my own advertising community: https://plus.google.com/communities/112906456891174626789) but it reminds me of the fable of the two ticks with no dog to suck the blood from. It's still good, and the traffic from there is prone to convert somewhat better.

Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/qwikad/)... I am still trying to figure how to make it work to my advantage.

What I am trying to say is this: All social media venues are great if you can gain a significant following, otherwise you will always feel like they are not worth the effort.

And of course, nothing beats the good, old, targeted paid advertising.

 

Hey, @qwikad.com I'm not trying to come off as Mr know it all or anything, but I'd just like to offer some friendly advice.

I see that your Twitter account is Tweeting 20+ advertisement tweets just within a 5 minute period. Why so much? Followers tend to get really burned out from seeing the same thing over and over again. Why not make 90% of the Tweets just normal thoughts, ideas or tips to establish a connection with the followers? Then make the other 10% the promotional tweets. I see that you're using a lot of hashtags too (Which may be the reason you're Tweeting so much, right?) I do the same thing too, but I have the # Tweets scheduled to go out once every 10 minutes from a secondary account so I'm not annoying the followers on my main one.

Your site covers a very wide variety of niches that you could also target directly... So instead of continuing to put your effort into promoting your site as just a "Free Classifieds" site, why not create some secondary social media accounts and target those from a few of the specific niches within your site to promote to those who may otherwise not be interested? So gaming for example, create a profile and target gamers, then promote the gaming links on your website to them instead of your site as a whole http://qwikad.com/0/posts/5-For-Sale/90-Video-Gaming-Systems/<- Like this one for example. With the right tools you could also target people by their location which would be even better.

Anyway, not telling you what to do haha so please don't take it the wrong way. Just throwing out some friendly advice. Your site is very nice and I wish you the best of luck with it.

 

I already have what you're suggesting. If you go to any category, at the top there are social media buttons. You can tweet directly from there. Each category / subcategory has its own unique title, link and hashtags. I update titles and hashtags virtually daily, so they are more or less unique every day.

Also, keep in mind that the more you tweet the likelihood of your tweets being found in searches increases dramatically. That's why I tweet a lot and hashtag them a lot too.

I get a ton of traffic from Twitter, my point is it's the most random, un-targeted traffic that there's. It seems like the people who benefit from Twitter greatly are the ones who know how to make their tweets go viral. Have not happened to me yet...

 

It's a long-term plan, you won't always get results immediately. You have to leverage Groups and communities within these social networks for immediate traffic, but the goal is to build up a following over time...

 

Alright, sounds great buddy. To each their own. Different things work for different people when it comes to IM. I've never owned or even helped promote a classifieds site before so my advice is strictly just an observation and is not from any personal experience with a site like that. Instagram is also another great tool. Second best for me when it comes to social media traffic.

All the best,

 

You are so behind of times if you think effective social media marketing is posting your ad directly to the viewer. It's all about creating an engagement which leads your viewer to you and your product. If you are blasting 20 different ads a day to your followers you are completely clueless and never going to see success with social media. Imagine registering for a monthly news letter in a niche of your interest and instead of receiving interesting content you are blasted with spammy ads...would you unsubscribe? Absolutely. If not...then you probably would stop reading. Same with social followers. You need to post things relevant to your audience and purpose...get them interested in what you have to say. Spark an engagement among your content... Then when you have that engagement subtly and occasionally indirectly market to them.

Quikad all it takes is a quick glance at your social media accounts to see you are completely clueless with your approach. And someone just gave you sound advice and like an idiot it goes in one ear and out the other because you believe you are doing it right........yet you also admit to seeing no return. Stubborn. Stupid.

 

hiii,

where we spend more than 25% of our online time, Social media. 80% of marketers are already promoting their content in social media. And three of the “newest” social networks, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat, are based entirely on the visual.

When sharing content, take advantage of the customizable posting features allowed on the social media platform being used.This includes the headline, image and a description of the content you are sharing.

Every marketer and social media user is competing to catch , so the more optimized your post is for that particular platform the more effective your social media promotion.

So that social media is very usefull for sharing the any content and get the traffic on your site.

 

I will echo Alex_p words. Prepare your sales funnel and measure, analyse and iterate the effect of social media. Start with setting up goals in Google Analytics, compare them with your insights from social media dashboards and calculate your ROI (manually in excel or in online reporting tool automatically).

 

Netstar, netstar... LOL. You've been in my ignored monkeys trap for a while now. I didn't know who that ignored post was from, so I happened to glance. Sure enough it was you. You will kiss any ass, just to come across as a know-it-all-jerk. Nothing unusual.




You have nothing to show for in your stinky dealership. I've got results. So shut the f*ck up, you, blabbering fool. And don't expect me to reply to any of your buffoonery posts again. I am just trying to make a point that you are a blabbering fool, that's all.

 

Marketing point of view yes absolutely, sales point of view rarely. Look at it this way, you go to a party or a get together with friends or on a Meetup meeting.
You suddenly start talking about your business and how cool it is ad everybody listens until you start asking them to buy from you, then everybody is deaf
It is a fantastic way and an absolute necessity to do so specially in this business climate, the more people know your business through a personal touch the better.
It is not a quick way to promote but it is a must and good long term plan.
Also remember when doing social networking, always follow up and attend follow up meetings or stuff.

 

Of course they are helpful. If you have good marketing plan and strategy you will increase your social media presence and even sales. There are a lot of tools, agencies and freelancers engaged in this sphere, who are making money because the sphere of social media is flourishing.

 

Social networking is extremely important when attempting to get your brand or business out to the general public or a target audience. Have you heard of Hootsuite? It is a good tool for keeping organized while scheduling and posting social media updates. I heard about a business in Markham called 360 Business Local that is really good at marketing and helping businesses flourish!

 

It depends upon the subject and target audience. The best way to go about it would be really share and post valuable information and promote your page to the like minded facebook users who already joined similar fanpages. You can invte them to like your page, create polls, post new content regularly, create free promotional offers etc. Social networking takes time before you see good results.