Did you know that millions of people visit FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites every day? The numbers of account users are growing and using these sites is one of the best ways to advertise and you can do it for FREE! Well, the idea I am suggesting won’t necessarily be free to your business, but the advertising will be.
What am I suggesting? I am suggesting you put your business on one of these highly trafficked websites and start with a bang with the best marketing plan available. What is the best marketing plan? Give something away!
There is no easier way to gain more customers, more traffic to your site, and take your business website from being just any other site to becoming viral, and you can do this in a short amount of time. Everybody wants something for nothing, it’s a proven fact whether a study has been done on it or not. Would you turn down something free if you wanted it, could use it, or knew someone else that wanted it or could use it? Of course not, typically people will accept something for free even if they can’t use it. This is, in a nutshell, is what you can do that will help increase business.
Let’s say you are in the restaurant business and you want to bring more people to your restaurant. The quickest way is to offer a free meal or gift card to your company. You aren’t going to be giving this prize to everyone, you can even just give it to ONE person. Make it interesting, exciting, and fun for the members of your page. Here is one simple idea to make sure more traffic is brought to your social networking site, to your website, and to your place of business. Offer the “free gift” by making it a contest. For example, let’s say you are using FaceBook. Make the promotion a contest. Have members join your FaceBook page and have them enter to win by posting a picture of themselves on your page. Step 2 involves the person to post a link to your FaceBook page on their wall and have them encourage their friends to join your page and VOTE for them by leaving a comment under their picture or clicking “Like” for their picture. Whichever photo receives the most “likes” or “comments” wins the promotion that week. This will Increase the number of people on your FaceBook page because people have to join your page to vote for their friends and they in turn will want to win something as well. This kind of free word of mouth can’t be passed up!
The people who have joined your FaceBook will now see all of your posts in their news-feed, this means they will be made aware of any promotions you are offering, deals, news, etc.The more friends you have on your page the more popular your page will be and thus make your website rank higher in search engine results. The item you give away will be well worth all of the new traffic your site is going to receive.
Let’s say you aren’t in the food business but are in some other business that sells services, whether it be computer services or electrical services. You can apply basically the same principles, give away a gift certificate, a discount, or a free job. For this, you should consider how much this is going to actually cost YOU. Let’s say the free service has a value of $200 dollars, make sure the promotion is a good investment and is going to actually bring you in more customers. If you have a business or website that you just want to draw traffic to but not give away an expensive product, give away a $10-25 gift to somewhere else, maybe from a business friend of yours’ company.
You are gaining more people to your social networking site quickly and efficiently and will gain untold amounts of free advertising for your site or business with each “wall post” you make, remember, each post you make is going to show up in each “friends” news-feed. Not every wall post has to be about your business, you can put jokes, anecdotes, etc in the news-feed as well. Make the posts interesting, throw in promotions as often as you can and make those promotions work for YOU.
Before long your social networking account will have tons of “friends”, your site will have new traffic and more of it, the better the prize the more viral you will become, and an increase in sales is right around the corner for you. Try it out, I promise you are going to be happy that you did!
