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How about nearly free marketing and attention for your business? How does that sound? Pretty amazing doesn't it? But is that even possible or how "cheap" can it be when your budget is next to nothing like mine, and many of yours likely are when you are just getting started running your online business? That is where social media comes into play, it gives you the attention you need for your brand and/or business without the costs of traditional advertising such as TV or Radio. Businesses live off of attention and social media gives us a way to "day trade attention" according to Gary Vaynerchuk, and this is the one thing you should be focused on when starting your business. Get the attention and provide value, that leads to the basis of increasing your sales for your business!  What Are The Benefits of Social Media for Business?As mentioned before, Gary Vayerchuk likes to hammer down the importance of attention in your business and how that is what keeps the business alive and thriving. One of the main benefits of social media is getting that attention to your business at a fraction of the cost of traditional media such as TV, radio, etc that cost thousands of dollars to even get an ad up. Compared to social media where you can get an ad up for FREE if you post it, or even for around $10-$100 through social media influencers! Some platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram have their own tools for running ads and promoting your business that can get your ad in front of thousands of people for juts a couple of dollars. These tools are really under used in marketing at the moment, so you should jump on the train and get ahead before prices skyrocket! Not only are these ads cheap, they are also much more targeted than any other ads you put up. Say you have a billboard or radio ad for your business, other than a few points such as people who listen to a certain type of music or live in a certain area, this is not really a targeted ad. Compare that to Facebook's ad platform, where you can target by country, interests, age, gender, and more! You really can't beat that because a more targeted audience means you are getting a better bang for your buck. Another benefit that social media can have in your business is that it allows you to connect with your customers in a way other platforms can't compete with. What other platform allows you to have conversations one on one with your clients or let you build community within the platform? Not many and that is why social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are essential to be using for your business. They give you a way to build trust and a sense of community, increasing your long term and not short term sales like ads do. People buy from who they trust, so consistency in posting and responding and engaging to comments is the way you build that trust. If you are unsure about how to use social media to connect and engage with your followers, Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a book about exactly how to do that called-- The Thank You Economy. What Is The Best Social Media for Business?The first thing to realize when asking what is the best social media platform for your business is that each platform has it's own voice and what works for each platform... whether it be just engaging or using links to drive sales... you have to respect each platform and use it the way it was meant to be used! I am just going to go over Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at a glance here and explain what works for me on each platform If you are looking for a more in depth analysis, with examples, check out the book: Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuck! To start off with, my hands down favorite social media platform for business... Instagram. Instagram is one of the top social media platforms for business because of both the amount of users on the platform, even though Facebook is bigger, but more importantly, how engaged the people on the platform are with one another. Instagram is a powerful content platform for business, focused around images and creating value through images captions for your audience. It allows you to be found by other accounts through the hashtag feature as well as through location if you have your business located in a certain area. One of my favorite parts of this platform is the comment feature as it is super easy to use and allows you to reply to comments as well as add you insights on others posts. This is exactly how you engage with your audience! Finally, Instagram has my favorite direct messaging platform for reaching out to both customers for sales as well as influencers to work with. You can access your direct messages easily at the top of your feed unlike platforms like Facebook where you have to go through a separate messaging app! My next favorite platform is Facebook, less for the content aspect and more for the advertising platform they have. Facebook offers you the biggest reach with the most users on their platform but to get any sort of exposure it is going to cost you money. Facebook is great for putting out videos, doing live streams or putting out your blog posts and engaging captions. But to use the platform, or even reach all of your audience, you are going to have to pay. While many of you are probably thinking "well shit, I have a small budget," don't worry because this platform has super cheap, and targeted advertising! You can run Facebook ads for as little as a couple of dollars and reach a thousands of targeted people! Plus, since Facebook owns Instagram, the Facebook ad platform lets you connect to Instagram and reach even more people! The final platform I am going to touch on is Twitter, and how to use this platform is pretty straight forward. Twitter isn't as powerful when it comes to finding accounts through hashtags or for post engagement just because of the sheer amount of tweets that get posted everyday, without an algorithm to organize them. It is just like a mashup of who you are following, which can be hard for some accounts and businesses. The trick here is going to be sharing valuable pieces of information in your industry as well as for your audience. But the most important thing to market and engage on Twitter is to find your voice on the platform. A great example of this is Wendy's responding sarcastically to tweets about them. Find your voice and start responding to Tweets around your industry, at the very least you will start conversations that could lead to business relationships or sales! Connect With Us!Just a little break midway through this blog to get your opinion and let you connect with the community of millennial entrepreneurs some more and continue the conversation! Check us out on snapchat: profitingtools or on other platforms by clicking below! Would love to hear from you so shoot us a DM if you have any questions and came from the blog! How Businesses Use Social Media For Marketing?And we are back... :) Social Media, as mentioned above, is one of the best marketing platforms for your business, whether it be an online business or a brick and mortar business. There are a few ways to tackle marketing through social media and I am going to go over my two favorite. The first one is pretty straight forward and effective, that is using the platform on Instagram or Facebook to promote your posts, products, page, etc! This is as simple as going to an Instagram or Facebook post and pressing "promote" on Instagram or "boost" on Facebook. From there you set the budget, enter your target audience, and enter the duration of the ad. Then you enter a payment method and you are done, simple as that! On Facebook, you can also do things such as promote your page, to get more likes, promote your website to get more clicks and more! The next way to market your business on social media is through what we call "infuencers." Infuencers are people on social media, usually through Instagram, with a large and engaged following! This one takes a little more work then the promoted posts but has the potential to work a hell of a lot better if you are trying to grow your Instagram account! You start out by searching keywords in your industry or going to suggested followers of large accounts in your industry and finding accounts that have a following of ideally over 10K and with a following that is liking and commenting a good amount on their pictures. Then you simply start reaching out to the and direct messaging them to see if they do shoutouts or sponsored posts if you are looking to do more than one post. They will send you their prices and you ca compare across other accounts to see where you can get the most bang for your buck! Payments are usually through PayPal for these shoutouts so make sure you have an account setup on PayPayl to make the transaction easy! If you are looking for a place to start your shoutouts I own a few accounts that I use to shoutout members of the profitingtools community at a great price, I will include the links to those Instagram accounts below! How Do I Start Social Media Marketing?The first step to start social media marketing for your business is to determine what platform is going to be the best for you! Do you have more of a personal brand and want to start focusing on YouTube and Snapchat? Do you have a business or service that you could create cool content for on Instagram and Facebook? Do you have more of the Etsy or Pinterest type of content? Figuring out your social media platforms of choice is always the first step and I would always recommend using Facebook and Instagram no matter what! After that, time to figure out what type of content you are going to be posting and this is the most important part! We have to realize that there are thousands of other pages around the same niche as you so what are you going to do to stand out from them? You have to create content that brings them value of some sort... whether that be entertainment, teaching them something, helping them do something better, r whatever you can to help yourself stand out from these other pages! This is your "voice" for the page and is essential to help you stand out on all platforms so make sure it is authentic to you and you aren't putting on a fake persona! Finally, consistency in your posts, the sames times everyday and the same amount of posts. I struggled with this early on because I wasn't posting consistently across the platforms and therefore I wasn't growing like I wanted to. Once I started to find the best times for my posts and starting to post multiple Instagram and Snapchat stories each day, I started to see consistent growth on the platforms!! Social Media Marketing TipsJust gonna throw out some of the tips that have helped me the most in this section, no real order and test a few out because what might work for me might not work for you!
Hope you all enjoyed this post on how to use social media to market your business! I know this was a more basic or beginner blog post and I will be posting more in depth ones in the future so stay tuned! Thanks for the support and if you are looking to connect even more check out the links to join the community for millennial entrepreneurs on social media! -Taylor
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