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Social Media is the wave of the marketing future. Any companies that have not already embraced social media are quickly being left behind.
It is the place to connect directly with your customers – Marketers know that they need to go where the customers are – and customers are online and using social media!

Social Media Strategies

Lets take a quick look now at the main social media outlets and their functionality:

Facebook
One of the biggest and most popular. Any product can find its customers on Facebook. Facebook allows businesses to create a fan page for their product or business. This fan page can be accessed and  ’liked’ by anyone on Facebook. Once one person ‘likes’ a fan page, everyone on their list can see this on their newsfeed. People who also know the product/business can ‘like’ the fan page. In this way, the advertising for your product/business can be seen worldwide.
You can also create a group for your business/product. In much the same way as a fan page, users can join the group who know and enjoy the product/business.  People who have joined the group will then get updates from the group page. You can update all the members on your latest products, sales and offers and business happenings.
Check out what some of the International big brands are doing on Facebook now, just search for them in the search function. Facebook is one of the most widely used social media strategies.

Twitter
With millions of users on Twitter, it can be daunting to try and find legitimate users to market to. Some say that Twitter was created specifically for copy experts to get sales messages out there. Others say it is a simplified version of Facebook. In any case, its a social media strategy you cannot ignore.
You can easily register your business with a twitter account. Finding people in your target area is easy – simply search for the topic of your business, and you will see the users that are tweeting about this. Follow people who make informative and useful posts in your business area. Add your twitter to all sales messages going out, be it from your website/blog or email. People can then choose to follow you. By creating your list of followers in this way you are creating a database of people that you can market your message to.
Ensure that your copy skills are up to scratch as 140 characters is not a lot, but should be enough for you to send a convincing message.

Digg
Digg is a social bookmarking site. Different from Facebook and Twitter, it enables you to post website/blogs that are interesting and informative.  You can become friends of users, and users can become friends of you, similar to twitter in the ‘following’ function. You simply bookmark an interesting article/website/blog and then it appears in the live feed. New bookmarks will appear on the front page for a while, and they will stay on the front page if people ‘digg’ them. By ‘digg’ing a bookmark, people are saying that they like it.
You can submit pages from your business on a regular basis and your friends can be updated on your business happenings in this way.

Social media strategies are essential in today’s business marketing plans. Take the time to investigate what is right for you and implement the strategies to ensure your business is not left behind.