Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook can be a great marketing tool if you know how to use them the right way. They can also be an incredible source of valuable information if you know what to look for. Social media sites can teach you a lot about your target audience, and their needs and wants.

Search

Take the time to do a series of searches related to your niche on social media every week. Pick a set of terms, or phrases that relate directly to what you’re doing, and search them on social media. The results will contain people talking about your niche, and what’s going on in it. If you take the time to read through some of those results, you’ll get two things out of  it. First, you’ll get new friends and followers. By taking the time to connect with the people you find through these searches, you’re gaining high quality friends and followers. Second, you’re gaining valuable information about what people in your niche are talking about. The more you know about their interests, the better off you’ll be in the long run.

Polls

Set up a poll on your website that asks questions about your customers, and their wants and needs, and what they think of your products. Use social media to spread that poll around to your friends and followers. If you’ve been using social media the right way, and interacting with them on a regular basis, they’ll most likely leap at the chance to give you feedback. If you don’t get the response you’re hoping for right off the bat, create a contest around the poll, and offer one lucky poll taker a prize.

Questions

If you want to know something about your customers, just ask. By asking questions on social media sites, you’re achieving two different things. First, you’re interacting with your friends and followers in a meaningful way. Second, if they’re answering your questions, you’re learning about them and their needs at the same time.

By spending some time with social media, you can turn it into a valuable market research tool. The more you can learn about your customers, the better equipped you’ll be to sell your products to them.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a new website, chances are you have looked into hiring a professional designer. A lot of design firms charge extremely high rates for simple websites, and in many cases there are additional costs for different types of functionality. With design firms charging such high rates, it’s hard to imagine getting a website off the ground on a budget, but it can definitely be done.

Setting up a site using WordPress is actually fairly simple. If you’re comfortable with some light HTML, chances are you could do it yourself, as long as you’re not looking for anything too complicated. Most hosting providers offer an automatic install of WordPress, and once it’s installed, all you really need to do is make a few simple tweaks to the theme to get it looking the way you want it to. If you’d like to add a little bit of additional functionality to your site, there are many plugins and widgets available for WordPress that allow you to do a wide variety of things. There are some plugins to help with SEO optimization, some to add things like polls to your site, and some to allow you to embed a podcast right into a post. Some of them require a little more effort to set up than others, but if you’re on a tight budget it might be worth the time.

If design firm prices don’t fit in your budget, and you don’t feel like you could learn to set up a site on your own, there’s a third option. Sites like elance.com let you connect with many freelance designers. Freelancers can often product the same quality work that a large firm would deliver, but given that their operating cost is significantly lower, you’ll get a much better price out of them. It’s important to go through a site like elance rather than just searching Craigslist for a freelancer. Elance, and other sites like it let you see a designer’s profile, along with reviews of their work. That way, you can be sure you’re getting a designer that can handle your site, and won’t leave you high and dry if there’s a problem.

Don’t be discouraged by the prices big design firms offer. If you take the time to do a little work with your site yourself, or if you can find a freelancer that suits your budget, your site can become a reality, even if your budget is tight.