of social networking site, with around half logging on at least once a day. These sites have become the perfect tool for businesses, with access to millions of contacts and potential customers reached worldwide with daily updates, tweets, blogs, links and videos. The sheer number of networking sites can be confusing enough – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and FriendFeed to name but a few – before you even begin to think about how best to market your business There’s no denying the positive benefits of marketing through social networking, no
24 TODAY’S BUSINESS WOMAN
Social skills S
ocial networking sites are rapidly expanding – the internet has 1.8 billion users, and more than 1 billion of these are on some form
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are more than just private networking sites. Keep connected and don’t overlook these innovative marketing strategies ideal for getting your business at the forefront of consumers’ minds. BY FIONA FORMAN
matter how small or large your company, and best of all, it’s free. In March this year, Dell announced $9m of its 2009 sales had come directly from Twitter and Facebook combined. Stephen Felice, president of Dell’s small and medium business group, said, ‘We interact with 3.5 million people through Twitter, Facebook, blogs and Flickr. These are powerful tools, but we don’t just use them for generating sales. Social media gives you information that you can use in real time, and base decisions on. Most people think that innovative technologies are used by enterprises, but they’re not, they’re first deployed by SMEs. This is a really powerful tool for SMEs, who don’t have the marketing dollars for traditional advertising.’
Press enter To get started, you need to set up a page or
profile for your company and post updates at least once a day to keep people coming back. Facebook is a good place to start. As the biggest social networking site in the world in just six years, it has gained 500 million global users and 26 million UK users, with an average user spending 55 minutes a day on the site. To start marketing on Facebook, rather than a profile page, businesses should create a fan page for their business. Other users can then ‘like’ your page, become a fan and post on the page’s ‘wall’. There are currently more than 1.6 million active fan pages, with businesses from Microsoft to Deutsche Bank to
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