Those of you who have successful online businesses know just how to make money with social media. Before you can earn money using social media you need to understand what social media is all about.
Social Media In Plain English
Social Media, simply put, is a way of communication through various online applications. The more familiar online applications are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Linkedin and Tumblr.
Big businesses use these online applications to spread the word about their product and often they will use a well-known celebrity to help spread the word.
A social media post by Selena Gomez is worth more than $500,000.
For us mere mortals though we use social media to hopefully bring traffic to our site. Bringing traffic to our site will in the long run make us sales.
Although it is great to have sales your main objective when you have a website is to give your followers information. If your site is about treating acne then your content should reflect that.
You want to help out people who come to your site as much as possible.
In order to help people they need to find your site. Using social media can help you do that.
Facebook as Social Media
Using Facebook is one way to attract visitors to your site. You can make a Facebook page which will reflect the topic your site is about. Articles on your Facebook page can link back to your website. The topics on Facebook should reflect keywords that people are likely to type in when they are conducting an online search.
Another way to get traffic to your site on Facebook is to join groups that are related to your website and participate in these groups.
By participate I do not mean to spam the group. Spamming a group will get you ignored or worse banned from the group.
Another social media outlet that can help draw visitors to your site is Pinterest. Pinterest is a very visible type of social media. When you open a pinterest account you will be asked to create boards. Boards consists of pictures. If you have a site about running shoes you would most likely be posting pictures of various types of running shoes and then linking them back to your site.
You should create several boards with a variety of pictures representing different things just to mix it up a bit. You never want to seem like you’re up in someone’s face with a product you are trying to sell. You can create multiple boards showcasing some of your other interests. You may create boards about great places to visit, food you like, the possibilities are endless. Try to make your boards as interesting as possible.
Using Twitter
Twitter is another social media networking service that many online entrepreneurs use to bring visitors to their site. It was started in March 2006 by Evan Williams, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey.
Users send messages or “tweets”. In order to send a tweet you do need an account which is free, if you do not have an account you can look at other people’s tweets. The one thing that makes twitter unique is that the tweets people send can only be 140 characters.
Now in the beginning the 140 character limit also included photos and videos and any attachments and links. This was changed in May of 2016. The aforementioned will no longer be included in the 140 character limitation.
This should make it easier for people to come up with their tweets because sometimes it can be difficult to say what you want to say within 140 characters.
With these changes made it is now easier for you to link your tweets back to your website. The trick is to make those 140 characters interesting enough for a person to want to click on over to your website. So again you would not tweet “Buy this click here” but rather tweet something which is going to raise a question such as “Why does Mr Basketball wear type B runners? Find out now!
That is not the greatest of examples but I think you get the general idea.
Using Instagram To Make Money
Instagram was introduced in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Using Instagram alone will not make you money, it will however help with your brand. What you are going to be doing is using Instagram to bring people to your site and then hopefully convert those visitors into buyers.
In order to benefit from Instagram you will need to make a landing page that is directed towards the people coming over from Instagram. Your objective is to get them to sign up for your email list. Everyone knows the money is in the list so the more people you can get to sign up the better.
How Does Linkedin Help Your Online Business
Linkedin is another social media application that can help your business. Linkedin has been described as a community of business professional. Here you can hook up with other like minded professionals and work on building your brand. Even a small company can establish themselves as an expert in their particular field.
Linkedin has text ads that you can use to target your potential customers. Getting your message in front of the right people is crucial for the success of your business.
You can take what they call a passive approach when using Linkedin. The passive approach will have you keeping your Linkedin account up to date and build on your connections. By doing this people who are interest in your product or service will find you.
You will also establish connections with other business professional that can help your business to grow.
Some people like to take a more aggressive approach when using Linkedin. This does require more work on your end as you will be making regular status updates that will interest your target audience.
Join groups and become an active member. Send messages and invitations to like minded members in your network. Make sure you are not spamming.
You can answer questions in Linkedin which will give you more exposure and establish your credibility as an expert.
Linkedin also has paid advertising which many believe to be quite reasonably priced. They are also known to send out offers of free advertising for a month once in awhile. When the free offers come around it would be a great opportunity to see how well it works for you.
There are many more social media applications that can help your online business become successful. Social media is a great tool when used correctly to help you build your business.
Learning how to make money using social media tools correctly will take some time and having some help and direction on how to use them would be very helpful.
My favourite place to go for help with this is Wealthy Affiliate. They have many tutorials that will help you out plus a whole community of like minded individuals willing to help you learn the right way to use social media in your online business.
Try Wealthy Affiliate for free today!
Social media is definitely important when it comes to growing your business and there’s a lot of money to be made from them! But it’s really hard to find the time to manage all those social medias! It takes so much time to steadily grow followers on each of those.
Hi Dainius thanks for dropping by. You are so right even though social media is an important aspect of your online business it is very time consuming. You are best to pick a couple of the social media platforms and work with just them. One that is often recommend is Google+. Good luck with your online business!
I definitely need to brush up on my social media marketing skills after reading this – there could be a ton of traffic I’m missing out on for my blog!
I always find these kinds of things too noisy by far – every newsfeed seems to be overpopulated by spam after spam. Do you know of any tools that can help control social time lines?
Hi Chris I am not sure what you are asking. If you are talking about tools to help you with your social media campaigns then there are various tools out there that can help you. some are free or have a free option and other are paid. Personally I do not use any of these tools. Being retired allows me more time to do my social media myself.
Hi Maureen,
For a fact I know personally I still need to “step up my game” regarding how I use social media to help grow my online business.
I have this aversion to using particularly Facebook as I’ve heard all of the negativity that takes place on that platform, in fact after thorough research writing an article about the hacking and other crude things that take place there.
However, I now understand that there would be steps to take on Facebook which could help prevent this type of negative activity from happening against you as an online business owner looking to make money through promotions. Basically you just have to be very vigilant on who you meet and what communities you become a member of.
All of the other sites, including Google + are excellent tools to promote one’s business as you stated in your well-written article.
Btw, I do think I soon that soon I’ll take my first tentative step into the water regarding my own use of Facebook.
Jeff
Hi Jeff I definitely understand your aversion to Facebook. I did make a page for one of my niches but for other sites I joined a couple of groups that are in my other interests and comment there. I always find when I am on Facebook my computer slows right down and starts acting up. The less I can go on Facebook the better I like it.
i’m pretty familiar with Facebook and Twitter, but less so with the others. I’m really just getting started with Pinterest and realize that I have a lot to learn. When you’re creating your social media campaigns how do you make sure that you can post to each one without taking a lot of time to do so. Are there applications out there that allow you to post to more than one site at the same time?
That’s a good question Momma Bear. Personally I do not use any application to help with posting, however there are quite a few of them available. One of the more popular applications seems to be Hootsuite. They can handle several of the social media platforms for you. They have a free version and a paid version. Another application that seems quite popular is Buffer. They offer a short free trial period and then charge $10.00 a month after that. You can schedule posts ahead of time allowing your content to be staggered throughout the day.
Many of the applications do offer a free trial period but then charges range from $9.95 a month to $99.95+
Hope this helps and good luck.
I agree that there are so many opportunities now to make money using social media. So many different platforms and each of them has a set of pluses and minus. My personal favorite is Twitter. I think the rules of how to monetize social media are really in a developmental state which makes it exciting. You’ve got to balance providing good information with your desire to promote a product or service.
Thanks for your comment Mike. You are so right when you say you’ve got to balance providing info with your desire to promote. So many people become more focused on promoting the product they begin to sound like the sleazy car salesman. You definitely need the balance for a successful business.
I used to be intimidated by Twitter but I am using it more and more now and actually liking it a lot.
Best of luck to you!
Great information on social media and how they can help us drive traffic to our website. I have been looking for ways to increase traffic to my website and this article helps to shortlist the effective ways to do so. What about Google+, Discus and other social media sites that are less talked about? How can we maximize these to increase traffic and make money?
Hi Lily the best way for you to get more traffic to your site using social media is to actually use these sites on a consistent and regular basis. You need to be consistent you cannot post to social media once a month and expect to get yourself a ton of traffic.
You need to be posting to your site on a regular basis and then posting this content to the different social media sites that you are using. I would not try and post to every social media site either. I would learn a few and get comfortable with them. This will work much better than haphazardly using a lot of them and not know what you are really doing.
Hope this help!
I really needed to see such an easy to understand and simple explanation for most of the social media platforms, those that are most used at least.
Do you think every new enterpreneur should use all of these platforms to promote their website or it is usually better to choose these social media channels that we find the easiest to use?
Do you plan on presenting each of these social media platforms in details – how to start, what is best to do, etc.? It would be very interesting and useful.
Thank you
Hi Ellie I think it is best for beginners to start out with the social media that they are most familiar with. If you are not familiar with any of them then I would learn how to use one and learn it well before moving on to others. I personally only use four social media platforms and the first one that I learned was Google+. The other ones that I use are Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.
Looking into these platforms in greater detail may just be a great idea for content. Thanks!