The best social media practices

If you have yet to introduce your company to social media sites, you need to get on the bandwagon quick. Just about every business is on social media sites as it allows you to gather market research information for free and it can also help you reach out to a new audience without needing to pay a dime to do so.

The downside many marketers are facing with social media sites is that their customers just aren't listening to them anymore. Since so many businesses are on social media sites, customers are being blitzed with too many messages. Social media sites help people to connect and interact but if they aren't connecting with your company, what else can you do to reach out to them?

Customers are buying or being influenced by their friends and other customers instead of the companies. The tricks is finding the customer that is still listening to the marketing messages and spreading them along to their friends.

Before you start a Facebook page or a Twitter account, you need to know exactly what you are getting yourself into. If you don't know anything about the micro-blogging site Twitter, it's not really going to help your case too much to start up an account and attempt to talk to your customers. What you really need to do with social media is use the easiest tool you have at your disposal, participation. When you are on facebook, get into the discussions and talk to your customers. When you are on Twitter, use the retweet feature and you also want to become a follower to other accounts. As you follow others, you will be able to start to learn the jargon that people use when they are tweeting and you will also be able to see what type of information you should start posting.

Interacting on social media sites is easy to do and it's a great way to show people that you are active on the site. Try to log on daily in order to reply to messages sent by your customers and to send out new posts that have valuable information. When a post isn't valuable, people will start to question why they are following you on the social media sites and pretty soon they will block you because you are bothering them.

Take some lessons from other companies that have had a lot of success on social media sites. Best Buy is one of the most effective companies on social media sites as they have been able to learn how to participate in social media sites instead of just sitting back and watching. Here are a few things you can learn from Best Buy and the way they have been able to connect with their customers on social media sites:
1. Listen to your customers. This is an opportunity to find out what your customers really think of your products and services so you need to take advantage of it. Listen to what they are saying and learn from them.
2. Make yourself known and easy to find. When you chose names that are hard to remember, people won't be able to find you. Try to pick a name that is easy for people to remember and easily relates to your company so they can find you and pass your information along to others.
3. Keep it short and sweet. When you post a message, keep it short. People won't remember a lot of information that you are posting so you want to make it short and easy to remember. Be authentic and transparent with your messages, this also makes it easy for the customers.