My Latest Tweet
Follow @FirasAlkhaffaf
Get Your Customers Involved
One mistake a lot of businesses fail to do is getting their customers to engage with them. One key point to grow your business is to listen to your customers wants and needs; responding to their cries! So it becomes a good way of getting feedback. Also, what social media will allow you to do is give you the ability to interact, engage and participate in dialogues with your customers. If you do this well, social media will also become a good source for testimonials 
Still Having Doubts About Social Media?
If you’re still doubting the power of social media, let me break down the advantages for you! The first and main thing is cheap communication as there are several methods to reach out to your customers using several social channels, including social networking sites, social groups (e.g. groups that you can find on LinkedIn and Facebook), Micro-blogging (such as Twitter) and so on.
When you take advantage of the different social channels, (and people like you) you will start building a community (which in business terms is called “grow your database”). This will allow you to target your customers or potential customers without much effort. Cool huh?!
Social media will also let you reach out to customers all around the world without needing to spend much money, both geographically and demographically! The reason I mention demography is because on social networking sites, you can actually target people/customers depending on gender, age, location, hobbies/interests and so on.
Can you see the power of social media now?
Another way of how to use social media to grow your business is PR and the best place for PR is online as you are not restricted to the location you’re in. Offline PR is also effective but can be very expensive, however online PR is effective and swift as content on Internet spreads like wildfire.
So What Can You Do Now To Get Started With Social Media For Your Business
I would recommend using social networking sites like
- Facebook to reach out to customers i.e. B2C business
- LinkedIn to reach out to people in other businesses i.e. B2B networking
There are other sites too but the above are the two leading ones.
Another effective way of how to use social media to grow your business is to start blogging. Set up a blog for your business now if you haven’t already done so. Not only will this bring fresh content to your website but it will also get search engines indexing your websites more frequently. The more pages you have in search engines, the greater chance of people finding your website. Also, with blogging, people/customers can start interacting with you as they can leave comments. Starting a dialogue is the starting point of making a sale 
There is also Twitter; different people have different opinions on using Twitter for business. I think if you use it correctly, it’s one powerful tool, but if you’re just going to tell people what you had for breakfast or how mowing the lawn is fun, you’re not going to do well. Also, if you’re just going to use Twitter to hard-sell, again, it won’t work. You need find a balance. Twitter is like a party, no one is interested in buying anything when they’re at a party. It’s about mingling and interacting. That’s the power of Twitter.
I’m going to wrap this up by saying social media is the way forward to help you grow your business online, so take advantage of its power before your competitors do.