| If you want to set your business apart from your competitors spend some time creating and fostering relationships with your current and prospective customers.
Strong business relationship lead to long term customers and this is good for your bottom line. If you have been ignoring social media it's time to recognize that you are turning your back on a vital direct connection to the people who have supported your business and those people who may be your next customers. Your customers are a vital source of information for any company. They can help you understand how to better meet their needs and therefore, retain their business while attracting new business. One of the most powerful ways to tap this valuable resource is by finding more ways to connect with your customers and build lasting relationships.
Relationship building is an ongoing process on and offline. Social media makes it easier to start and build relationships with current and prospective customers all over the world. Your marketing plan should include dedicating resources for building your online presence through posts, blogs, backlinks, bookmarks, commenting and more. Your website is simply not enough any more. If you want to speak to your customers and grow your sales you will need to connect with them using popular social media.
Social media makes it easy to build relationships with your customers, here's how.
- Instantly create connections
- Expand your reach to new markets
- Ability to jump on customer service issues right away
- Better identify gaps in your service provision
- Know what people are saying about your company
- Increase awareness of what your business offers
- Increase referrals and sales
- Generate new sales with offers
- Post Product or Service Reviews
- Improve customer experiences with your company
- Generate fresh online frequent content that you control
What to do next:
Have a look at some of the popular Social Media sites to see which ones are the best fit for your company, products or services. Don't limit yourself to just the large sites, if you can find niche sites directly related to your purposes this can be ideal and easily found with a Google search. Here's just a few of the top ones ranked by Alexa.com
YouTube.com Facebook.com Twitter.com LinkedIn.com MySpace.com Yelp.com StumbleUpon Tumblr.com Reddit.com Flickr.com Digg.com Metacafe.com del.icio.us segnalo.com BlogCatalog.com technorati.com mixx.com Rojo.com Kaboodle.com gather.com Folkd.com KillerStartups.com Newsvine.com Faves.com BlinkList.com BuddyMarks.com WireFan.com Mister-Wong.com
Before the Internet, building business relationships meant greeting your customer by name when they came into your store. Today, it means using social media to better connect with your customers and in the process of helping them you help your own company grow stronger. Companies and their customers are connected in a way never seen before and it’s your job as a business owner to facilitate this process.
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