again?”

Social media provides the stage on which you answer those questions.  Using social media, you are able to showcase your business’ products and services, the people who help make your business a success, the events taking place both in and around your business, and interact with your followers as they comment on your posts.  In this way, you can answer the two fundamental questions and increase traffic to your business.  Here are a few best practices for taking advantage of social media:

Timing is Money

Like blogging, you want to maintain a regular presence on your social networks.  This doesn’t mean you have to live on Facebook, liking or commenting on every post in your news feed, but you do want to be in front of your followers often enough to stay “top of mind”.  The trick is to manage the frequency, timing, and quality of your posting content to be the most attractive to the people who follow you.

Picture-Perfect

Pictures say in one image what it would take a ton of words to convey – if words could even do the job.  Pictures can show the proof of a product’s effectiveness or provide an enticement to encourage your follower or potential follower to sample your product or service themselves.

Share and Share Alike

Follow other pages or streams of business or people that are complementary (not competitive) to your business.  A restaurant may follow some performance venues or sports teams near their locations.  A retail business might follow the pages of the town or city it is located in, and perhaps the pages of some of the brands it carries.  Share or re-post items from the pages or people you follow; invite your followers to share some of your more important posts.  Reciprocation is a wonderful thing, and when your followers share your posts, it has the potential to exponentially increase the number of people who view them.