Increasing Awareness Around your Social Media Efforts

Getting noticed on social media websites is not an easy task, especially when using these social media websites for commercial purposes like promoting your brand and trying to gain sales. Though social media provides a lot of opportunities and benefits to the business owners, the dilemma is how business owners can get themselves noticed without being marked as spammers.

Once you have created a social media presence, it’s important to develop a social community. Although social media can provide many opportunities for companies, if you don’t have a community to talk to, there isn’t much to gain. Below are a few things you can do to increase the awareness and develop a community.

1. Tie Social Media into a Campaign
Instead of launching your social networks individually, tie each network into a specific campaign. When you promote the campaign, you can drive people to the specific social presence.

2. Integrate Social Media into the Website
On your website homepage, make your visitors aware of the social presence by adding social icons, feeding the network posts into the homepage, or integrating your site with social. For example, on your employee bio pages, link users to each of their LinkedIn profiles; or if you have a video embedded on your site, drive those users to your YouTube channel.  You can read more about tying a LinkedIn Strategy here in my previous blog: Utilizing LinkedIn as a Business

3. Use Existing Media
Your existing media channels such as print, eNewletters, radio and television can be used to help promote your new social presence. Tie a social icon onto the bottom of each print piece or email post to sure the social icons reflect your brand.

4. Timing
Know when your target market will be looking for more information and knowledge from you. Determine your top performing season or month and launch during that time. Avoid duplicating your promotional messages and provide the audience with useful information they will find beneficial. This will increase trust and loyalty.

5. Promote in the Right Places
Understanding your target market and where they are active online can be key to driving more traffic to your social presence. Promote your networks not only to your existing communities but reach out toward new customers, leads and fans.

The right vehicle for your target market depends on the product you’re promoting as well. For example, if you are promoting a music store, LinkedIn may not be the best place to promote music where a mix of YouTube, Facebook Ads and MySpace would leverage awareness to the social presence.

Even though social media set up cost is free, it takes time, talent and effort to drive traffic to the social channels. The dedicated time and energy to build and be active in a social community will pay off in the end.