I am sure by now you have a little about social media or Facebook/Twitter but do now know how to use it. In fact Obama (president of USA) won his election by focusing mostly marketing  through social media. Even Malaysia in the past election used a lot of social media and is currently the alternative government channel of reaching out to their fans.

So if the government is actively using social media for themselves, how about your business? Are your competitor online in Facebook already competing for their market share in the social media.

Just to summarize what social media can do for your business:
1  You can share expertise and knowledge on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

2  You can master these tools very quickly, and proft from them in a fast web enviroment

3  Your own customers can brag about how good your business is

4  You can bridge the gap to customers who don’t even know you exist, but would likely use your company

5 You can keep track about what people are talking about your business and brand (good or bad)

6. You can build a network of fans/followers who are hungry to know more about your business

7. You could build your brand in a very much cost effective way compared to traditional print advertising. Think owning your own TV station in Youtube or radio station in Podcast.

There are probably easily 20 more benefits and if I were to explain everything, I could probably write an ebook!

A recent survey on the social media powerhouse facebook noted over 300 million people currently use it. 300 million is a lot of people to tap into for business. And even if only half those people were active—and the number is likely more—the potential is huge. There are millions on the growing Twitter. LinkedIn is becoming an even clearer business social media
site. YouTube gets 1 billion hits every single day!

In Malaysia alone it is estimated over 5 million Internet users who has facebook account and watches youtube daily! Now do you see the potential of marketing your products or business there? How much of that market do you want to own? Can you afford not to take part and just watch as your competitors start utilizing these social media and leaving you behind?

SO how do you make money? You get known. Many online buyers might not even know you exist. There are so many companies online right now—there are millions of sites and billions of pages—un-less you get ranked very highly on Google and Yahoo, you will still have to invest capital into other marketing efforts. Email marketing is very powerful, and combined with social media marketing is a better choice at any stage, whether you’re just beginning to get online and starting your business or even if you’re established.

Here are some examples how I helped my customers use social media. Do you know you can target demographics, age group, gender and even education level? How cool is that for targeted marketing? Here are some tips you can implement immediately as I always advice my customers.

1. find out who your buyers are by inviting them to join you on social media sites like Twitter and face-book. by doing so, you gain at least some info on who they are. You might notice mostly 40-60 year old men buy your expensive video games with high end graphics, but that teenage girls are actually the ones who buy in the most volume from your role playing games.

2. Use Twitter to keep in touch, sell them on new services, ask for products they might want to see more of, and products they feel aren’t worth the money.

3. Use facebook or a Yahoo Groups forum to be more friendly with your buyers. Video gamers are going online to play games by the millions, so you can set up pages for them via groups, forums, or social media tools like facebook. You can even post new screen images of your games (or if you are selling something else too of course)

4. Finally, you want to know what they can afford. If your buyers are mostly the elite, people with bigger wallets, you  may see different opportunities than if they were penny pinching people on low wage jobs. It just depends on their education and vocation, and by fnding these out you gain great knowledge.

Business to consumer is the king of social media, but business to business cannot be ignored. Most of these examples were focused on b2C, which is the biggest market, selling products and services directly. If you focus on b2b, you can sometimes earn more. The same strategies apply. business owners and CEOs are using social media tools more than ever to fnd new partners for business enterprises. And some businesses purchases will make you more than any single customer will ever make you.It’s not all clear yet where social media will go, but I see one of the best things it offers you is simply an ability to fnd out who is buying from you. Instead of getting their emails—which is still good—or by having them fll out a form—which is good but rarely works—you can make buying from you more enjoyable and learn to keep customers over long periods. Social media is the key to all that.

Having said all that, if you need help branding online and harnessing the power of Internet to grow your business, just give me a call. I would love to hear from you. I can easily be reached at
0194751379 (Charles)