Facebook and Twitter - why use them for business?

Have You Discovered The Benefits Of Using Social Media?

Social media; now I am fairly sure that you have all heard and read about it but are you using it? When asking this question I am not talking about using it to keep in contact with your friends and family – I talking about using it to promote your business. I meet many business people each week and I am often astonished at the amount of them who merely dismiss the idea, it is as if they just do not want to know or perhaps they just do not have the time.

In my experience it is the business people that are aged over thirty that are the ones most likely to shy away from using the likes of Twitter and Facebook. They say to me that these are things that their children use and that they are too busy trying to run their business and to keep their business going during these difficult economic times. The point that they are missing or that they are simply unaware of is the fact that social media could well be what enables their company to survive the recession.

Whether you are for it or against it there is one company that is very much for it and that is Google. They regularly communicate that they love social media and that it is now a part of their algorithm – the way in which they rank a website. How many times have you seen a Facebook business page or a Twitter account highly ranked in Google? It is happening more and more these days.

The fact that Google is looking for website owners to use social media is a good enough reason to start. I want my website to rank highly in Google and therefore I keep up to date with their communications about the best ways of promoting a website. To write regular blog posts is something else which Google have stated that they like as it adds “freshness to a website”. Once the blog post has been uploaded to the blog you can then tweet (on Twitter) that you have a new blog post and your followers can then, if they so wish, go and read it. You can also add a similar notification on Facebook.

I am mainly mentioning Twitter and Facebook in this blog post however there are many other social media platforms which you can use such as Pinterest and Google plus. I must admit that it is time consuming and at times it can be quite tedious but believe you me people like myself would not be spending this amount of time if it was not bringing us the benefits. To create that social media footprint for the major search engines is now seen as a must for those of us that want to receive high levels of traffic from search.

But social media is beneficial for reasons outside of search. The connections that you make via the people who follow you on Twitter and Facebook are also potential customers. By regularly communicating with these followers can enable you to make a whole raft of new long term business relationships.

I could write forever about this subject and the benefits however I do not want you to feel that I am in any way preaching. However please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. john@greatdealscolchester.com 0r 07796 302941