Promote a Product Using Social Networking Sites
With billions of people around the world using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, it is important to include these communities when promoting a product or a business. The number of people you can reach is a huge benefit to using social networking sites to promote your product, as is the amount of resources that are required. Using social media and social networking is a lot cheaper than traditional marketing and advertising methods. Promote a product using social networking sites by determining where your customers and potential customers are, and getting your product visible on those sites.
Steps
- Target the social networking sites where you want to promote your product. Most of your customers are probably using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn at a minimum.
- Consider other, lesser known sites. Check out the profiles on Tumblr and Pinterest, 2 social networking sites that are growing.
- Establish your goal. Obviously, you want to promote your product. Be specific about what else you want to do. This might include selling more products, attracting return customers or gaining new customers.
- Set up a Facebook page. Your product can have its own page, where people can like it, comment on it, leave reviews and even link to your website so they can buy it.
- Encourage people to like your product page. Offer incentives such as coupons and discounts. Invite people to share your page with their friends so your community can grow.
- Develop surveys, quizzes and other engaging content that will generate interest and drive traffic to your page and your product.
- Create a Twitter account. You can set up an account on Twitter for your product and promote it by attracting followers.
- Come up with brief messages that describe and promote your product. You only have 140 characters to talk about it.
- Follow people, brands and companies that might be interested in your product. The more people you follow, the more followers you have a chance of attracting.
- Use LinkedIn if your product is relevant to businesses and professionals. LinkedIn is a social networking site that is predominantly used by professionals and business people.
- Set up a group for your product and reach out to people and companies that your product could serve. Post regular reviews and updates.
- Skip LinkedIn if your product does not sell in the business world niche.
- Blog about your product. Use your own blog or write guest blogs for other websites about the benefits and popularity of your product.
- Encourage people to share your posts and share them yourself by posting them to other social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
- Put together a YouTube video. People watch billions of YouTube videos every day.
- Make a video or a slideshow about your product that will serve as an advertisement that can potentially go viral, which means it gets forwarded and viewed by many different people.
- Encourage others to post videos of themselves using or benefiting from your product. Many companies hold contests or give away free products in exchange for submitting videos.
- Join other social networking communities that are relevant to your product. Explore places such as Tumblr, Pinterest and Google Plus.
- Be strategic about where you promote your product. Make sure your customers or potential customers are on those sites.
- Get demographic data and other statistics on who uses social networking sites. There are a variety of data mining companies who can do this research for you and give you specifics. You can also do the research yourself by conducting Internet searches which will give you general information.
- Ask your customers where they like to go online. Take a poll on your Facebook page or ask for comments on your blog. This will lead you to ideas.
Tips
- Remember to separate your business and personal profiles online. While knowing who is behind a product is important, you want to keep your promotion targeted and professional.
- Manage all of your product's social networking profiles with an aggregator. There are tools such as TweetDeck that allow you to manage all of your social networking profiles at once without having to visit every site individually.
