Social media is important for all businesses, whether they are bricks and mortar businesses or online Internet-based businesses. There are many offline businesses that can effectively leverage social media to strengthen and grow their businesses in creative and effective ways.
Many of the popular social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and Foursquare are capable of engaging local customers, increasing the popularity of your business and boosting your sales. There are many ways that an offline business can use social media to its advantage:
- Exciting and high-quality online presence: Once you have created profiles on the various social media websites, you need to update them on a regular basis. You should pay close attention to comments from your customers so that you can respond to them, publish new and interesting content, and continue to form new relationships and maintain existing ones. The more you update the status of your different social media, the stronger your business’s reputation will be.
- Get the whole company involved: If you have a staff, allow them a certain amount of time during their workday to post updates on your business’s social media websites. This is an excellent morale booster and your staff’s involvement will strengthen your marketing effort and increase your business’s online exposure.
- Social integration: Ask people to “like” your offline business on Facebook and follow your offline business on Twitter. You can then promote the social integration on your business receipts, signs and invoices so that your existing customers will want to jump on the social media train as well. You can also ask your customers to check in to Foursquare or one of the other geo-location applications once they arrive in the general proximity of your store offering them special promotions enticing them come in.
- Scope out the competition: Depending on what sort of business you have, you may or may not be heavily involved with social media. Always remember to stay on top of what your competition is doing by reading everything that they post. Remember that you and the other businesses are always fighting to stay on top.
- Strengthen the sense of community: the relationship that you should have with your customers, whether the relationship is online or offline is one that makes them feel like they are family (or, at the very least, very close friends). The way to achieve this is by having live events at your store as well as events online. You can promote your community and your business at the same time and people will begin to feel as though they belong at your store and that you want them to be there.
- Don’t do too much and become overwhelmed: If you don’t have any help in managing your social media platforms and you try to do it all by yourself, you may find that you aren’t doing it well. Be selective in your choice of social media channels and make sure that you go for quality over quantity.
- Guard your business’s reputation: Are you aware of what your existing customers and potential customers are saying about your business, products and services and brand? Pay special attention to the comments that people are posting online. It is also a good idea to set up Google alerts and to immediately handle issues as they occur. This is your chance to show people how much you care about them. Help them to solve their problems and address whatever concerns they have.
- Exercise patience: Remember that it takes time to see significant results with social media when it comes to the success of your business. Always remember that your hard work will definitely pay off and the more relationships you build and the more you interact with others, the more interested other people will be in connecting with you again and again.
- Reciprocate: When you post content online and you receive comments, not only is it important to respond to the comments but it is also a great idea to share other people’s posts if they hold value for your connections. After all, the idea is to enhance the experience of your online connections.
- Giveaways: You can use social media to give away free products from your store. There is a guarantee that that will attract attention and people will want to interact with you and will want to be the first to know when you introduce new products and services.
Conclusion
If you use the tips that are discussed here, your offline business will become more and more successful and more and more people will want to connect with you and will want to buy what you are selling.
.
.
.
This article was originally posted by Michael Cohn in the CompuKol Connection Blog on November 25, 2010
.
.
.
