You Need To Follow Your Customers' Social Habits

Running a business AND building a social presence for it is not easy. Perhaps it was never meant to be. A year ago there was only one place to position your site in the social media madness, and loads of webshops and bloggers alike jumped the Facebook-wagon - created a site, and started spamming their "fans" with competitions, coupon offers and news about everything.

Nowadays it's different. The number of social sites that you have to take seriously is steadily growing. It seems that the internet had room for more than one after all.

Golden piece of advice:

The internet is an everchanging space!

(no shit, Sherlock!)

Twitter and Google+ are amongst the ones you should notice, and both are sources of business whether you sell yourself, your blog or a physical product. If you're not there be square! But why is it important? You already build yourself a solid Facebook fanbase, uploaded that nifty little logo in the top-left corner, and you even regularly update the place.. sort of. Why do you need MORE of that social sphere surrounding your business?

You have to be there. HAVE TO! As you have preferences as to what social media site you tend to visit most often, so does your customers. As new opportunities pop up they might switch platform. I, for one, is spending more time on Google+ than on Facebook these days. Needless to say that wasn't the case a year ago (as G+ didn't exist by then). Twitter is growing rapidly as well, epsecially in the US. In Europe it's still kinda geeky to be tweeting, but I suspect that is about to change.

Bottomline: If you want to reach your customers, you have to continously position yourself in their point of view. Once they discover a new platform you have to discover it as well. I'm not saying that you need to post special offers to every and all social websites out there, but you definitely have to pay attention to at least the top two or three most popular.

Golden piece of advice:

If your customers are moving to G+ you can't stick to your Facebook-page only
(that's perhaps logic, but I point it out anyway to sound smart)

If you're not already present go get yourself a page on Google+ as well as Facebook and create a Twitter-profile for your business. In the long run you will benefit from it, and there are smart systemt out there that allow you to post an update in only one of them and have it automatically shared on the others.

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You may want to read this brilliant book on creating a social media presence to get yourself started building your brand, and driving customers to your business using the social media platforms! I did, and I learned a thing or two that helped my wifes webshop sell ten times as much to their Facebook-followers as they did before.

Go, go, go! Socialize like your customers!