Guide To Boosting Your Sales Using Social Media Marketing

The internet has in no small measure revolutionized how people connect to one another. But just when we thought that chatting and emailing were the epitome of internet communication, the so-called ‘social media’ was introduced to humanity. The rest, as they say, is history.
Thanks to social media sites, staying updated with what is going on with the people in our lives has become a lot easier and more convenient.
As a result, people congregate to social media sites. It has become so popular that at the moment Facebook has over 1 Billion active users. And Twitter, another popular social media site, was recorded to have over 140 million users, as of the year 2012.
As at the time of writing this report, Nigeria has become Africa’s second largest country on Facebook, after Egypt, with 6.5 million users - relegating South Africa to the third position for the first time ever.
With the astonishing growth of social media over the years, it was only a matter of time before businesses took notice. After all, business goes where the people are.
And so it happened that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and other social media sites have became powerful tools for business. 
So powerful are they that Moses Rex, sales executive at Revive Phone, Ikeja, in a recent chat with SuccessDigest, described social media marketing thus: “Any business that is not embracing social media marketing now is moving towards doom, because in years to come they will have to go out and drag people from the streets to buy from their stores, when they don’t see customers again.”
So what really is social media? ‘Social media’ is a phrase being tossed around a lot these days, and it can sometimes be difficult to answer the question of what social media really is. Therefore, the best way to define social media is to break it down: If the media is an instrument of communication, e.g., the newspaper or radio, then social media would be a social instrument of communication.
For a better understanding, think of regular media as a one-way street where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report on television, but you have very limited ability to give your thoughts on the matter.
Social media, on the other hand, is a two-way street that gives you instant ability to respond to information.
Social media websites don’t just give you information, they interact with you, while giving you that information. This interaction can be as simple as asking for your comments, letting you share, or letting you vote on an update, article, picture, video, link etc.
What is social media marketing? Simply put, social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic, or attention through social media sites.
With Facebook Marketing for instance, any Nigerian entrepreneur can cheaply and easily reach the over 6million Nigerians on Facebook.
Social media sites to use for best results
 In the world of social media, there are a lot of  platforms, with more springing up every now and then; but these five social media platforms are the best for social media marketing: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+ and LinkedIn.
Why businesses use social media marketing, and why you should too? Alright, let us start with the ‘whys’. Why do you need to have a social media account for your business? Why do you need to make it popular among other users? It is important to answer these questions, because opening and maintaining a social media account will cost both money and time. And as a businessman, you surely do not want to invest on something that will not yield results.
So, will having a social media account actually be beneficial to your business? Well, it depends. Having a Facebook account or a Twitter account may be beneficial to some business establishments, but not to others. It may result in increased sales in some instances but in other situations, it may just end up as a liability. So, your first problem is to ascertain whether having one is helpful to your business, or not.
To help you decide, here is a list of reasons that show how having a social media account might be beneficial to some businesses, given the right situations. You can examine these reasons and check if they are applicable to your business or not.
1. To reach potential customers, far and near:
A social media site normally allows people from different countries, across different continents to join as members. Therefore, a person with a social media account opens himself to opportunities, like meeting people from faraway lands.
What does this mean for businesses? Basically, you are opening yourself up to potential customers from different countries – not just potential customers from your motherland. If you believe that the products and/or services that you offer would appeal internationally, then having a social media account is a cheap way to reach viewers abroad.
For instance, a beach resort in Lagos, Nigeria, which believes it might be internationally competitive, might get the attention of foreigners, by setting up a social media account. This may also be true for sellers of native products and other goods who want to sell their products to other countries.
Niger Azu, an IT personnel with foremost mobile phone retail shop, Slot, upheld this claim. He told SuccessDigest that social media marketing has expanded the reach of Slot. He says, “When there was no social media, Slot was doing well in sales. But with the use of social media marketing, there has been  a 20% to 30% increment in sales.
 “A lot of people call us from outside Nigeria. How did they get to know about us? With this, we have been able to extend our sales beyond Nigeria, and to people that are really far from the town in the country.”
But what if you are only selling products and/or services that are targeted to just Nigerians? Well, you may still set up a social media account. After all, social media sites like Facebook allow you to advertise to select regions if you like.
Kennedy Aliche, Manager, Fair Heavens Auto, Okota, Lagos, says he agrees that social media can go a long way to boost sales for businesses. He adds that more than 50 percent of the vehicles he sells are bought by people he marketed his products to using the social media. “We have a Facebook account, and most of our customers get to know about us through that Facebook account”, he says.
He says the pictures, prices and other details about the vehicles he wants to sell are posted on Facebook as a first step. Then he initiates discussions on them, with the hope that a buyer who is serious would emerge for him to bargain with, and make a sale.
On his Blackberry phone, Aliche says he has the contacts of several car dealers, and that all of them network to increase their sales. “Once I have new cars, I broadcast the information to all the dealers, using either Twitter, Facebook, emails, or my Blackberry. Some of them show interest, and we start to bargain using the same social media.
“If a customer comes to me and asks for a particular kind of car, and I do not have it, I immediately contact other car dealers, and if they have it, they send the picture and other details to my Blackberry phone, and the customer gets to know as well. I have closed several deals this way”, he says.
2. To gain credibility in the modern society:
Around the year 2003, when camera phones were still quite new, they quickly became a trend among youngsters. If you wanted to be cool, you should at least own one. Why? It is because a camera phone was the latest in technology during the time. Having one was like a display of status.
The same goes for social media sites and businesses. Having a social media account is currently the rage in the modern world. If you want to be ‘cool’ or ‘in’, you should at least have one. And this has also resulted in a rather bizarre trend among companies and brand names: if a company has a Facebook account, it shows that it is competitive, strong, and up-to-date.
There is an almost inexplicable appeal to a company that has a Facebook account. This may be because it gives potential customers an impression that you are moving with the trends. And that is a good sign, in their eyes at least.
3. To cheaply & quickly learn what customers are thinking, using updates, polls and surveys: Imagine this scenario: a phone company is thinking of releasing an upgrade of a phone which it recently released to the market (about 2 months ago). But the company is reluctant, thinking that current users of the previous model might react indifferently.
To see how its customers will react, they posted on their Facebook account that they are planning to release an upgrade model. A few hours later, hundreds of comments had flooded the said post – mostly negative reactions.
There are two observations here, which are of utmost importance to you:
(A) The company did not have to spend just to know how their customers might react.
(B) The company got the results in only a matter of hours, which is much faster than other methods like sending out survey sheets to customers.
  4.To concentrate on target market niche: When people sign up to social media sites, it is basic that they provide their personal information, which includes among others the following: age, gender, nationality, current address, marital status, and others. They may also include more in-depth personal information such as hobbies, interests, and others. So what’s in it for you?
What’s in it for you is that most (if not all) social media sites actually allow you to search through their database, using the aforementioned personal information as filters. For instance, you can search for users who are within the age bracket of 13 to 18. You can also specifically target women, married people, or people who listed football as one of their interests.
This means that you can use social media sites to find your target market niche.
You can focus or concentrate only on the people that you want to reach. For example, you probably want to focus your advertisement on moms, dads, and/ or married individuals if you are selling baby products.

How to use social media for marketing To use any of these top 5 social media platforms for marketing, you need either a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, a Google plus fanpage, or a LinkedIn account.
1). Facebook page A Facebook page, also called “fan page”, is a page you can create on Facebook for everything you find interesting – your business, your favorite car, your favorite food – whatever you may like. Pages are mostly designated for businesses, organizations and brands to share their stories, and connect with people.
However, if you are not an official authority or representative of an organization, business, celebrity, or band, you cannot create a Page to represent your organization on Facebook. For that purpose, you should create a Community Page and not an Official Facebook Page (see fig.
2). Twitter account A Twitter account is a user profile on Twitter where its users can microblog. They can share their thoughts, news, information or ideas in 140 characters or less. These profiles are usually public, which means that everyone has access to what you have Tweeted or Retweeted, unless you choose to make your account private.
Users can ‘follow’ your account (this means subscribing to your posts), and you can follow other users as well.
In your twitter updates, a.k.a. ‘Tweets’, you have the option of mentioning other users using the ‘@’ symbol. You can also use a hashtag (e.g. #Twitter, #Olympics, etc) to increase the likelihood that your tweet will be seen by other users who are searching that particular hashtag. Hashtags are used to generate trends and increase the ‘virality’ of a topic.
3). YouTube Channel A YouTube Channel is a place where you upload and broadcast your videos. In your YouTube Channel you can manage your uploaded videos, popular videos (‘Favorites’) and your organized videos – ‘Playlists’. You can adjust your own Channel with different backgrounds, formatting and modules.
4). Google+ Page A Google+ page is a profile you can create on this social network, e.g., for your business. First, you have to have a personal profile on Google+ and then, you can create your business Google+ page. On your page, you can inform users about your company, your products, promo actions and everything else you want to share with them. You can, for example, place a map on your Google+ page, so your customers will know where to find you. Moreover, you can use the Google logo on your company website, so your customers can add you into their circles, without leaving your site.
5). LinkedIn account LinkedIn is a social network designated for professionals. This means that the most important part of your LinkedIn profile is your career, jobs, education and other skills.
This business social network is a priceless tool for managers and human resources professionals. It helps many HR officers and head hunters search through the profiles of a large number of potential employees during the recruitment process. However, the basic LinkedIn profile is limited in function. If you want to use more advanced options, you will have to pay for it.
What is interesting is that, many users are no longer sending the traditional CVs along with their job applications. Instead they are sending their potential employer company a link to their LinkedIn profile.
Facebook Marketing Explained Let us get started with what is probably the most popular and most widely used social media site to date. As at the time of writing this report, Facebook has over a billion users around the globe, and 6,502,440 users in Nigeria. By using Facebook as a business tool, you can have access to all these users.
Getting Started With Facebook Before we tell you how to use Facebook to promote your business, we will first teach you how to set up a Facebook group account. It is rather simple, but there are some tricks to it.
Setting Up Facebook Page If you are using Facebook to promote a business, brand name, or products, then you should open a Facebook page, instead of a personal account. A page can be set as any of following:
- Local business or Place - Company, Organization or Institution - Brand or Product - Artist, Band, or Public Figure - Entertainment - Cause or Community
At the Facebook Homepage, you will find a button titled ‘Create a page’.
So how is a ‘page’ different from a personal account?
With a Facebook Page, you will not be able to add friends the same way as a personal account can. This means, there will not be a friend list that will show up.
Instead, people can simply ‘Like’ your page and become subscribers. They will then be listed in the ‘Members’ section.
A ‘page’ is preferred when using Facebook to promote a business, company group, organization, and similar things.
Activating All Features of Your Facebook Page In the beginning, you are not given full access to all the features of a Facebook page. To activate all features of the page, you have to gather 30 likes from other users. This may be quite difficult to achieve. But there are ways to get this done easily.
 Here are some: 1)   Ask for help from all your friends and family members. It is likely that you know a lot of people who also have a personal Facebook account. Tell them to like your business’ Facebook page.
2)   If your business has employees, you can ask them to like the company page.
3)    Advertise your page using Facebook Ads.
4)    Like other pages so that your profile will appear on their pages. This way, people will find out about you and hopefully, they will like your page too.
5)    Sometimes, if you ‘Liked’ a page, the owner of that page will ‘Like’ you back. And these are just some of the things that you can do to get your first 30 likes.
This is important in order to activate all features of your group account. Get this done before you proceed with the rest.
Promoting Your Facebook Page After you have set up your Facebook group page, and after you get your first 30 likes, it is now time to promote your Facebook page. By ‘promote’ it means you want to get a lot of people to view your page. You also want them to ‘Like’ your page, because doing so will subscribe them to all the announcements you will make on your page.
 It is important that you get views and likes, because it is the main reason why you even set-up the account. A social media page will not serve its purpose unless you get views and likes. And simply opening an account and letting it sit still will not get you views and likes. You have to work in order to achieve this.

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JUNINETIN INNOVATION
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