Use Social Media to promote website?

byalbert22

430 followers

8 years ago

Social Media: Should I Mix With Online Business? Should we use social media sites to help promote an online business?

Today is April 30, 2017. I’m a month in to working on establishing an online business. While I’m not new to the world of computers, working an online business is certainly a new endeavor.

The other thing I really haven’t really used is social networking. Sure, I have a twitter account (@albert973), but I haven’t done much with it after I set it up. I even tried Facebook, but I didn’t pursue that either. And, earlier this morning, I went ahead and set up a Google + account, but I really don’t know what to do with it.

Many of the folks I know use these, and other social media sites, but they’re not working on an online business (that I’m aware of anyway). They use it as a social organizer/contact management platform. But it seems everywhere I go on the internet, the majority of online businesses are using at least one form of social media to promote/market whatever product or service they are selling.

Truth be told, I see the logic in using social media to boost your business. But it seems to me that you should know what you’re doing, and how to do it, if you want to follow that route. I’ve read some comments about how well the social marketing has performed for many businesses online; but I’ve also seen some comments about what a waste of time or money someone’s social marketing experiment ended up. Either there was such a poor response, and nothing was gained, or so little that it tuned out to be a wasted effort.

I’m pretty sure my main hesitation is that because I really am not familiar with how these social sites work, I don’t want to look amateurish, or worse, using these sites to help drive traffic to my site.

Can’t be afraid to fail!

Should I know better? Of course! I’m a firm believer in learning by doing, and applying lessons learned in failure to future projects. After all, no one is born already knowing how to do everything. Most skills are learned, and that by practice.

The next question, then, is which site should I start with? Do I set up a Facebook page, and then try a “Facebook Promotion”? Do I try paid ads on Facebook? What about LinkedIn? Is there a way to do a promotion on LinkedIn? Is it permitted?

Then there’s Twitter. How can you run a promotion with 140 character limitations? Tweeting out a whole ad campaign could take days!

Obviously, I need to buckle down and start getting involved with these social media sites. So that’s what I’ll do. And of course, I’ll have to do a bunch of research for myself, to see which sites are the most popular for promoting an online business, and which are successful.

I’ll also want to find someone with experience that can explain the reasons for a campaign’s success, as well as for a failure. I’d like to shorten the learning curve as much as possible.

What do you think about all this? Are you in favor of using social media sites to promote an online business? Or, do you think it’s a waste of time?

If you have an online business, and you’ve used (or still use) social media to increase traffic, what would you recommend for me to try? What’s worked for you, and what hasn’t worked for you?

Please leave me comment below, or you can join a discussion here.

Thanks for reading…

Albert

PS - I just posted this question here: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/social-engagement-...

Also on my website: http://beyourownboss-starttoday.com/social-media-s...