Social Media is where you want to be when it comes to helping your business expand, as it is a priceless asset in the marketing world. Social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin attract so much continual attention from Internet users, it has become a phenomenal and powerful venue for advertisers to create interest and traffic. Here are five reasons to use social media for business.

1. Help Increased Search Engine Rankings:  Social media profiles frequently rank highly with major search engines. Using brand names and keywords in your profiles can help you to generate traffic for your social media sites and company homepage.
2. Generate Site Traffic:  By updating regularly on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with posts that link back to your site, you can create additional traffic to your site.
3. Find New Customers Through a Company Profile:  Your company profile is a great opportunity for you to post regular updates on your activities, but also about important news and trends in your industry. It’s critical to post regularly if you want to increase your followers or fans and convert them to potential leads.
4. Brand Monitoring:  Having a social media presence allows you to better understand what current and potential customers are saying about your product or services.
5. Networking:  Through social media you can quickly build a network of core supporters, which is essential for any up and coming business to keep growing and expanding. It is that group of loyal followers that will keep bringing your company business and referring it to others if they are pleased with what they are finding.

Following on from this, here is a little bit of ‘New News’ - Introducing Tokkster, a new type of chat room.

Tokkster is a new type of Internet chat room, which enables users to chat with other people over the same webpage. Pretty Unique.

All you need to do is sign up with a Tokkster account (and yes, it’s free). And that’s it. Once signed up, you browse websites like usual. What you will notice is a Tokkster Status bar in which you are able to see other peoples faces that are browsing the same page at the same time. Of course, if you don’t feel like chatting, either minimize the app (to become invisible) or don’t log in.

Only available in Internet Explorer version 7.0 and above (other version coming out soon).

Isn’t it funny how every man and his dog is offering seminars on social media in business? How many events must one endure to realise its not for the faint hearted. Yes, in theory everyone is capable of investing such time into engaging in it and yes, most people after sitting through the first event on the benefits come out with an understanding of how to do it. But let’s not kid ourselves, when it comes down to it few can see it through with any real prospects of turning it into business. I’m not suggesting every business should be paying AsOne to engage in social media but I do feel those businesses that embark on social media without a true plan of action based on an understanding of how and why it will work are preparing themselves for a lot of work with little reward.

With so much focus on social media and the need to embrace it to improve and increase business the same hesitation continues to raise its head; “my customers don’t use Facebook”.

You know what? They are probably right, because those potential customers who do use Facebook are shopping somewhere else, Somewhere that does embrace social media. Lets look into who is using social media.

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There has been a lot of talk about the ‘new’ Google Panda update. This is a change to the Google filtering used to rank sites. The update is designed to hurt the sites that try to cheat or use what is called ‘black hat’ techniques to get to the top. The people it is affecting badly are the sites with traditionally high traffic and rankings. If they have used sneaky methods to inflate their position they will suddenly drop and others don’t necessarily rise, they just don’t drop. The net effect is they appear to rise.

However, a lot of SEO companies are advocating changing the sneaky methods to new sneaky methods to compensate. They fail to realise that the practice is the reason Google introduced Panda and when they see people working around it they will just make a new update. Its’ an expensive battle to keep on top of Google’s attempt to normalise results and keep high quality sites at the top. It’s why AsOne believe that Social Networking and Social Marketing using the power of people is a more reliably long term strategy and the foundation on which your Marketing should be based.

Think of this, Business has thrived for thousands of years based on word-of-mouth. You best clients tell their contacts and before you know it you have a good business. Concentrating on Search engines is like advertising in the yellow pages … time, effort and money getting a good advert, good position. Remember people changing their company name to ‘1st widget company’ so they appear first in the book? Google is the modern Yellow Pages. It relies on people ‘picking it up’ and looking for what they need. 

Social Marketing goes back to the beginning, it’s the modern equivalent of word-of-mouth. People will always trust their friends over an advert. Use that power to encourage and assist your customers to advertise for you.

Did you know the computer company Dell announced it made £6.5 million US dollars in revenues from their involvement with Twitter.

Dell uses Twitter to “listen and learn” from their customers directly. The number of customers following Dell online has increased considerably, with “11,844” people following them on Twitter @DellOutLet.

Those “11,844” customers receive special discounted offers exclusively as a reward for following the company on Twitter. This is a clear indication that Twitter and other social media networking sites are a very powerful marketing tool. 

Are you social?

Here at AsOne, we are social. You can find us on, 

http://www.facebook.com/asonedesign
http://twitter.com/asone
http://uk.linkedin.com/companies/asone-design
http://weareasone.com

We tie all online and digital marketing together so it works, AsOne.

Make sure your company gets “social” today.

Give us a call for more information on 0161 368 9100 or email us at: here@asone.co.uk.