A part, but a severely overlooked one, of running a business is motivating your customers to brag about your products to their friends and connections. In the past, this task was accomplished only through word-of-mouth referrals. But with the help of social media, doing something like bragging about their purchases is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse.
Motivate Your Customers
Business owners can motivate their customers to post their recent purchases by offering them discounts. With just one post, a single sale can influence future sales with minimal effort on your part. In order for businesses to do this, they can include buttons on their websites that will allow users to share content posted to their friends in Twitter and Facebook. There are a number of blogging platforms which allow businesses to easily come up with their own social media buttons. Some of these platforms include Blogger and WordPress.
Leveraging Social Media for Word of Mouth
At the same time, when you are using your website to sell products, schedule appointments or book rooms, then you should give your customers the ability to announce what they have just done through your website directly on their social networks through your website. By allowing your customers to do this your business benefits from free publicity and advertising.
Another situation wherein you can use social media to promote your business is by motivating your customers to “like” your deals online. You can launch various promotional deals which they can “like”. For instance, you can announce HD-TV discounts in time for the football season. When customers “like” these deals online, their activity is shared to all of their friends online informing every one of your current deals.
Be Where Your Customers Are
Why should business owners capitalize on social media? This is because experts are convinced that people have already begun sharing their lives through these social networking sites, primarily through Facebook. 40 to 50 percent of U.S. residents have Facebook accounts and each person has an average of 130 friends on the social networking site.
A number of companies have already cashed in on Facebook. In fact, whenever their customers purchase something from any of these company’s websites, they give their customers exclusive discounts which they must share to their Facebook and Twitter friends. When a friend makes use of this discount, the original customer gets rewarded with the discount as well. This system is called the post-purchase referral system. Some companies make use of coupons which has limited validity that customers can share to their online friends.
