Social media websites are booming and are widely used. These facts should make any marketer worth his salt, lather at the possibilities. The question is always, “how can I use social media to promote my business”? If used as part of a bigger marketing mix it can yield big returns and drive traffic to your site or business. If you are going to use social media to promote your business, you might as well take a short cut or two.
So you have your website up and your running, now you can sit back and relax, right? The bad news is, well, not really. You still need to push, promote, and assess and analyzes it. The good news is that there are many free and extremely powerful tools embodied in social media websites that you can use to measure the success and effectively promote your website.
Identifying A Few Great Sites
In the first category, Promotion: If your are looking to promote your website, I recommend that you use Stumbleupon.com. This is basically a social bookmarking website that harnesses the power of social media and web 2.0 to get the word out about your website. Try featuring your site there, I could explain in detail how it works, but the best way to learn how it works and to experience it’s effectiveness is to go there right now and start using it. Each site is randomly featured, allowing visitors to tag and mark their favorites and forward them on to their friends.
In the second category is Target: You should be looking to target specific groups and drive those people that are most likely to respond to your businesses’ call to action. I recommend that you use Facebook for this. With Facebook, you can sign up friends who have similar interests, and want to engage in conversations, chats, and blogs about it. You should set up at Facebook account for your business.
In the third category is Assessment: go to websitegrader.com. This is free service that just a few years ago would have cost you big bucks to use. Just type your URL and within seconds website grader will give you all kinds valuable information about your site and on how you can improve it and drive more traffic to it. Another helpful tool is Google Analytics. No Website should go without this tool. It will give you all of the traffic statistics you will need and help you see the trends associated with how your website is being used and where visitors are going to find your URL.
