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’re using Facebook as a marketing tool, you know how important it is to have a lot of active Facebook friends. One of the biggest challenges of using Facebook as a marketing tool is keeping those friends happy, and keeping their attention. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to keep them from losing interest in you.

Wall Posts

Be careful about what you post on other people’s walls. If you feel tempted to post messages advertising your products or services on other people’s walls, resist that urge. If you do, the only thing you’ll achieve is getting people to unfriend you. Instead, post friendly messages on other people’s walls, and try to get them to visit your Facebook page. You don’t have to directly advertise to your Facebook friends to get their attention. Try being friendly, and drawing other Facebook users to your profile, and from ther, let your profile do the rest of the work for you.

Be Social

Take the time to interact with other Facebook users. Social networking is all about being social, and if you don’t take the time to be friendly, and interact with other users, you’re not going to get all you should be getting out of Facebook. Be sure to answer any messages you get, and take the time to comment on wall posts. The more effort you put into being social on Facebook, the more it will pay off for you in the long run.

Talk About Them

People love to hear about themselves. Take the time to look at your friends’ Facebook profiles, and talk to them about their interests, and their projects. By taking the time to get to know your friends, and talk about them, you’ll be sure to get their attention, and draw them into your profile. The more interest you show in them, the more interest they’ll show in you.

If your Facebook friends are happy, and interested in what you’re saying, you’ll be more likely to get more out of them. Keep that in mind as you use Facebook, and you’ll be able to use it as an effective marketing tool.

If you’re reading this site then you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with SEO and why it’s important for your website. SEO can be a little complicated. There are a lot of factors to consider when search engine optimizing your website, but there are a few universal quick tips you can keep in mind to help get you started.

Title Tags

The title of a page is the first thing any search engine sees when they look at that site. Your title should include keywords relevant to your site whenever possible. You never want to leave the title set to something generic like “home page”. Search engines see millions of pages with generic titles, and as such, having a generic title isn’t going to help search engines to place your page in the right search results pages.

Make Sure Your Page Loads Quickly

Clear your browser’s cache, and refresh your page. Did it load quickly, or did it hang for a few seconds? Repeat this experiment a few times over the course of a day, and see how well your site performs over time. If you’re page is loading quickly most of the time, you don’t have anything to worry about. If your page tends to hang for more than a couple of seconds, then you might want to consider switching hosting providers, or hiring a developer to pour over your code, and look for problems. If a page is unresponsive, search engines will rank it lower than if it loaded quickly.

Original Content

Make sure all of the content on your site is completely original. It’s OK if you’re quoting another article here and there, but if you’re copying entire articles, or running an article that you purchased from someone who sold it to multiple sites, you’re posting duplicate content. Search engines don’t look kindly on duplicate content, and if your site contains a lot of it, you will wind up at the bottom of search results quickly.

A fast-loading page with a strong title, and good, original content will do well on search engines. By taking the time to make sure your pages meet these criteria, you’re ensuring that your site will show up higher in search results. The higher you show up in search, the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the more profitable your site will be.

Unless this is your first time on the internet, you’ve probably heard of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. These sites can be very effective marketing tools, but only if you use them the right way.

It’s important not to submit too many things to any one social bookmarking site. If you post a lot of things, and only a handful of them ever get popular, you account won’t be looked on favorably by other users, or the site itself. Most social bookmarking sites have anti-spam policies in place to prevent their users from abusing their site. If an account posts too many things in a given day, week, or month, that account will eventually be flagged as a potential spammer. Instead of posting a lot of links to one social bookmarking site, consider posting a handful of links to a lot of social bookmarking sites. If something does well on one site, it’s likely to do well on another.

Don’t just submit your own links to a social bookmarking site. Again, most of these sites have strong anti-spam policies in place, and if they see an account posting nothing but links from the same site, or the same handful of sites, that account is likely to get flagged as spam. Instead, try to find a few interesting things from other sites to share on days when you’re not sharing anything from your own site. Also, consider asking other users to submit your content. If your content is high quality, you won’t have trouble finding someone else to submit it for you. That way, you still get the benefits of having your link on a social bookmarking site without the risk of having your account flagged as spam.

The key word in the term social bookmarking is social. Remember to make friends with other users. If you have a vast network of friends on a social bookmarking site, those people are more likely to vote your link up on that site. Taking the time to make some friends can lead to a significant increase in the amount of traffic each link you submit gets.

So remember, post nothing but high quality links, avoid posting too many of your own links, and make friends. By doing those things, you can ensure that your social bookmarking account will grow popular, and your links will get popular along with it.