Recently one of the hot trends in Internet Marketing world is no doubt social media. A lot of products, PDF, articles are talking about how to leverage this new trends to get traffic to their website and make money. Marketers think that since a lot of people are gathering there, that is a good place to market their own product and service. And an increasing number of people are already having success on social media already, which in turn strengthen marketer’s believe that “social media is a good way to do marketing” and therefore they put all their effort to create an advantage for their business.
Before Getting On Social Media
While I agree that social media is a big thing, it is only part of the business game. No matter what social media you are using, the main key to business success is not only getting as many customer as possible. Business that want to make money should have a good product and service that can help customers get closer to their goal and stay away from pain. In other words, if you have the world most beautiful, multi-functional, flash and video enabled facebook page, if you are selling rubbish, you will not get a lot of customer. Worst of all, if you are selling crap, because of the viral effect of social media, your business will fail much more faster than without social media.
Social Media is just another way to drive traffic
Today’s hype of social media is quite similar to the time when website appreared 10+ years ago. At that time, business puts their fortune to create a “brochure” website in order to attract more customer. Sooner or later they find that, putting a fortune to create a website just because it is “nicer” does not worth at all. And it is too late, such website was costing too much and not bring any new customers.
Similar to 10+ years ago, now we have social media: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on. Business are smarter not to put theier fortune before but they still focus on creating a fancy facebook page to “get company name out there”. But what is important for a business? A business brings value to the world by providing solutions to problems and getting paid for it. In other words, social media is a tool that getting more people to know that “You have some good things that can help you out.”. If you target your market right, have a compelling offer, deliver your message to your target clients, constantly building relationship with you customer and selling more stuff to them, your business will win in the long term, even if social media disappears tomorrow.
How to leverage the power of social media?
To leverage the power of social media, just like what it is said before: Find a target market, getting leads and converting leads, and social media is a way to get leads. If you are putting a lot of money in social media but don’t have good result, the reason is probably that you are not targeting the right market, or your offer is not good enough. However, if you are getting those things right, your effort on social media will give you a big return, guarantee.