Social media is becoming increasingly more integrated into our lives, and for businesses, it’s an important key element to the marketing mix.   I’m a mum working from home in an online business and as I understand the importance of social media marketing, I’d like to share my experiences for the benefit of other business owners.

Your customers and future customers are using social media and it’s a great way to engage with them.  In addition to maintaining an online presence with your website, you need to be visible with a social presence also.

The worldwide recession is forcing us to add value to our businesses, so if you embrace social media marketing, the benefits will help to keep you trading in the future.

If you’re on a limited marketing budget, social media marketing is the most cost effective way to reach customers with information about your products, product news, sales, deals and more and you’ll find that if you devote an employee’s time, even on a part time basis, to setting up and running your social media marketing, you’ll have the ability to reach millions of potential customers that otherwise may never hear about you.

If you use some of the most popular social media marketing methods including blogging, you’ll have a very powerful outreach program that will raise awareness in your brand which in turn, brings credibility for your company.

Social media marketing will help build customer relations and if your consumers can easily share frustrations with products or customer service directly with you and get feedback, they will feel more confident in your brand and have a better connection to it.

Likewise, if consumers feel you value their feedback and you implement their suggestions,  for example, what to name a product or a perception of a product, they are far more likely to remain loyal to your brand and act as ambassadors on your behalf.

Social media can also generate high traffic to your business and in turn, increase sales which increases your return on investment (ROI).

It’s become an invaluable and necessary set of tools to add to your arsenal in the 21st Century and given the many ways we access the Internet including mobile phones and other devices in addition to computers, social media is set to continue the upward growth trend.

We may as well face it, it’s here to stay and we have to move with the times and best of all, it’s FREE.

Global Internet users top the 2 billion mark of which almost 300 million are in North America, almost 800 million in Asia, 450 million in Europe, 70 million in Africa, 200 million in Latin America & the Caribbean and 20 million in Australia and New Zealand.

Business owners are starting to wake up to the fact that they need to actively engage in social media marketing but many are unsure how to go about it. Maybe I can help from my own experiences here.

There are currently over 30,000 social media sites but this number is increasing by 300 each month and where do you start? Where do you focus your time and energy to get a return on your investment? It can seem like a minefield.

Whatever industry you’re in, you can create useful information in the form of blogs, articles and videos to share that others will find value in and learn from.  You don’t blatantly sell your products or services in social media. Your valuable content that is informative, educational and entertaining, enables consumers to get to know and trust you first. It then leads them from your social media sites to your website and that’s when you do your sales pitch. That’s how social media marketing works.

The three top giants that have become household names that I would recommend are Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

Facebook has over 600 million active users and these people are logging in for an average of half an hour each day so you need to get your messages in front of them.  This represents a massive marketing opportunity so you’ll need a Facebook Page.

Twitter has been around for over five years amounting to over 10 billion tweets sent which equates to around 50 million tweets each day and this number is rising rapidly.  It’s the place to find out what’s happening in the world. It provides instant updates on almost any topic.

Another giant is Youtube, the second largest Search Engine to Google and owned by Google, streaming over 2 billion videos each day.  Every minute, twenty-four hours of new video footage is uploaded and the average person spends fifteen minutes a day on Youtube viewing content, representing another massive marketing opportunity.

If you implement some of these strategies into your business, you’ll be heading in the right direction for sure.