social mediaWhen trying to define your presence as a business online, there are a few methods you should consider as a means of catching your customers’ attention amongst your competition. Utilizing various social media platforms in conjunction with marketing tactics can be your best chance at optimizing your online influence.

Common Problems

With the many social media outlets available today, it can be easy to become overwhelmed and lack efficacy in your marketing. A huge issue that companies have with social media is that they don’t put in enough effort, with a common misconception being that “if we just throw a page up there that people can like or follow, our social media bases are covered.” Many business owners see an online presence as secondary to any other marketing strategy and don’t stay on their social media presence. In order to see the rewards of effective online marketing, an account manager has to be very active with daily interactions and updates. This can be a lengthy process, but ultimately will be completely worth the while. As the article “5 Social Media Marketing Tips to Grow Your Visibility” on HostPapa points out, social media is perhaps the most key way to market to and interact with customers, and also one of the most neglected and misused outlets.

Another problem is that business owners will focus solely on pitching their products instead of interacting with followers or seeking their opinions. Listening can be considered one of the most important functions to social marketing. Aside of listening, another important function of marketing on social media is to track your advertising, There are many ways to track your sites analytics using Facebook, Twitter or something else, and WordPress has free analytics built into it. Staying on top of your analytics allows you to understand what kind of posts are effective as well as how to improve your marketing.

Advertise Efficiently

With the many social media channels available, it can be difficult to manage all of your accounts. Enter Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a great software that allows you to bundle all of your social marketing channels and post to each at the same time. The software has grown tremendously over the past year because making advertising easier is crucial to success for many business owners. Another tactic to make advertising more efficient is to write posts in advance and schedule them to be automatically published at scheduled intervals around the clock. Using a social media publishing schedule makes posting very time-efficient and even feasible as generating posts throughout the day may not be possible.

Make A Catchy Post

With the amount of posting a business owner should do to post effectively, one should not write content solely based on the company’s products or services. Posting something humorous or inspirational can be just as effective in attracting a potential customer’s attention. Quozio is a helpful tool for posting either your own quotes or another’s, and also makes them look aesthetically pleasing. It is also easy to post quotes to many sites simultaneously, making this tool a must-use for anyone who needs more posting material.

Customize Your URL

An important part of optimizing your search engine traffic is creating a vanity URL. Typically URL’s are difficult to remember and thus even more difficult to share or find. Creating a vanity URL, then, is a great method for ensuring your social media page shows up when someone Googles for your services. An example of what a vanity URL would look like is facebook.com/johnbrownbakery. Including “johnbrownbakery” instead of the series of letters or numbers typically assigned will make your site more easily remembered, as well as accessible when someone googles your information, as in this case, john brown or bakery.

Good luck, and make sure to implement these tips to your business big or small!

About the Author:

Camille McClane is a journalist, blogger and infographics designer located in Southern California who enjoys writing on all-things tech and social media, including web design, internet marketing and WordPress. She hopes you enjoy this article and wishes you luck in all your business endeavors!