Social Media is a tool for building strategies. With the popularity of Social Networking sites growing day by day, it is no wonder that businesses want to get onto the scene and increase their visibility. Dealing with potential consumers online is still a daunting task and fear still lurks.

How often do you hear your clients say they want to communicate with the public but don’t want to make the time to be involved on a day to day basis? They want to increase traffic and sales using the Social Media platform but no idea what it takes to do so.

Social Bookmarking

One of the first strategies to suggest is to use Social Bookmarking sites. Social Bookmarking is a way to get your sites in front of actual prospects for your product without depending on the search engines for traffic. Now without debating the subject, there are thousands of people using sites like Delicious, Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Propeller, Blinklist, Diigo and the list goes on and on.

Direct referrals coming from various Social Bookmarking services, and in particular, services which focus around your niche, would increase the opportunity of making a sale. This is only one aspect to consider when devising a promotional strategy.

As good as it is to be found in the SERPs of Google, Yahoo and MSN, businesses also need to be included in other properties. Focusing on the more popular Social Bookmarking sites to begin with and then adding more niche social sites as you progress will get you noticed.

Micro-Blogging

Some of you will argue that Micro-Blogging is a waste of time. Making small talk does nothing for productivity. I beg to differ. Having spent the last couple of years using Twitter, for example, has enabled me personally to make connections I would not have otherwise been able to.

There are many high profile users and brands all using this network and in so doing, have extended their reach to the general public. Some, like @Zappos have even been featured in the suggested users list which has increased their followers list by 200,000!

Note: @Zappos contact information in the left sidebar of their Twitter background. They make it easy for their customers to find and contact them which is one of the most important aspects for business today.

When using such a popular network to improve brand awareness and sales, this goes without saying. It is a clever strategy to be accessible in as many places as possible.

Social Networks

The Social Networking scene is ever evolving too. Once upon a time, MySpace was the biggest and the best. Now Facebook has taken over MySpace and leads the race.

Create a presence that looks and behaves like user profiles to connect and engage with your customers and amplify your voice to their friends.

The benefits of Facebook are not only the fact that you can keep your personal profile free from business connections, thus allowing you to keep up with your family and friends privately, the new business pages are a must for anyone with a need to keep up with their customers. The other benefits of creating a business page is so the content from your blog and or twitter stream can be automatically added to fill the content so your fans can easily keep up with your efforts and campaigns.

Keeping up-to-date with this information on how to use and streamline your Social Media profiles is imperative for knowing what to do next in your online strategies. How do you manage to keep up with changes and managing your profiles and business? All comments are welcome.

Ange Recchia
Hampton Internet Consulting 

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