Make Your Voice Heard On Social Media

Social Media brought new opportunities for small businesses. It can be used for marketing new products, creating brand awareness, staying in touch with existing clientele and making new contacts. However, the question that bothers most small businesses is that how they can make their voices heard on social media without being considered spammers.

Understand Social Networking

What most people forget about online social networking is that adding friends is not enough. You can add thousands of friends and bring thousands more to your fan page but they are not going to respond to your messages. Why? For one thing they don’t know you or your business that well. Secondly, you always try to take advantage of them. In real life, how you would treat a friend or a local business that is constantly trying to take advantage of you and always bothers you with annoying unwanted messages?

Social networking is all about making new contacts, communicating with people, understanding and appreciating each other, and helping each other with favors when needed.

Take Interest

Well it is understandable that most probably you are not as excited about Facebook as Kyle but you don’t want to miss out this great chance to be with your customers without spending any money. Now if you are there instead of just keep talking to yourself, how about you upload some pictures of your dog? Everyone loves dogs and your customers or fans might want to share their dog pictures with you after that. Or you can upload a video, you can share pictures of your business premises, or appreciate your friends and fans by clicking on the like button on the items they have shared and leaving a comment.
This does not take that much time, but if you will take genuine interest in the people they are definitely going to notice you and take interest in your offerings.

Make Exciting Offers

Instead of posting a discount banner on your social media profiles how about you make some exciting offer that is exclusive to your social contacts? This exciting offer could be a contest, or you can give away free t-shirts to winners or anything that does not cost too much. The point is not to lure your contacts into your evil empire building plans but to get to know them better and make them play with you.

Ask For Help

Being an optimistic I believe the good in people. I have realized that there are nice people out there who are eager to help others. Now if you are looking for some service, or going to buy something you can ask the contacts on your social networks to help you make a decision. You will be surprised to see the response.

Ask Questions and Answer Other People

A simple question such as “What you ate in lunch today?” would get you noticed. This is what social media is about people taking interest in each other’s life and staying up-to date with it via Internet. People feel obligated to answer questions, not that they have all the free time in the world; it is just part of human nature.

Be Kind and Be Nice

Politeness and good manners are not dead and they would help you a lot on online social networks. Be kind to people, be courteous, be helpful and be nice. There are actual human beings behind these profiles and they are emotional, passionate, and sensitive about many things, just like you are. Appreciate other people and respect their concerns.

About Ben Johnson: Ben Johnson is the Alliance Manager at Logoinn, a custom logo design company. He writes about the effect of design on marketing and brand identity and helps small businesses find design solutions for effective marketing.