Social media is a powerful tool for gaining customers and interacting with your fans. It allows your business to have a direct connection with your customers in a way that cannot be rivaled by mailings, commercials or even local events. Leveraging the power of this tool is easy with promotions.

Contests, giveaways, partnerships and referral programs should all be on your list. These are forms of social media marketing you can put to use. You can also consider discounts on products, free shipping and coupon distribution as parts of the advertising scheme.

The result of any one of these giveaways is attracting more customers and satisfying your existing audience. With more satisfied customers, you make more money. When you offer a good contest, your customers will share it with their friends, which can help to draw in more customers.

Instagram is an excellent visual tool for business marketing and promotion. Some suggestions include hosting a photo contest, documenting project expertise and posting photos of people using the business product offering to establish a customer base. Instagram also has the capability to help small business owners improve upon the product or service offering to customers. One way to accomplish this is to ask customers to post their own photos of the business product or service and display these images on the company website. Instagram photos showing the daily business operations performed by employees, product development and other business activities may also be posted.

Social media advertising is incredibly useful. You simply need to know what your goal is. Do you want to raise brand awareness? Are you trying to sell a specific new product or push an older product? No matter what your specific goal is, it breaks down into two general categories.

The first category is raising awareness. This is what most small businesses and start-ups should be working towards. New businesses do not have the large audiences necessary to benefit from certain types of contests, and so most social advertising will center on sharing content. A contest that requires sharing a post or photo to enter is a common method of raising awareness.

Building engagement is the other broad category. Your business has an audience, and you need to work to keep it. Established businesses with large audiences will focus more on engagement than awareness. The contests that raise engagement are the kinds that encourage users to participate in discussions or share content of their own for a reward.

Good social media marketing needs to follow certain rules, many of which vary from site to site. Every site has specific terms required to run a contest, as well as some tricky state and federal laws that come into play.

When using Facebook, make sure you use an app. Facebook disallows contests that don't involve an app on their platform. Developing an app of your own is ideal, but it is also an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. There are a number of preferred app developers that Facebook promotes for app creation, as well as customizable apps you can purchase specifically for use in contests.

Be careful of lotteries. Lotteries are specially regulated by the government, which defines them as any contest that involves three things: a prize, chance in the winner selection and consideration. Consideration, in this instance, means a cash payment or significant amount of effort required to enter. In order to avoid being classified as a lottery, you need to eliminate one of the three.

1. Give away a sample of your product or service to a winner picked from a pool of people who install your Facebook App. Be aware of the "share this picture to win our prize" contests because there are many such fake contests circulating and users are growing bored.
2. Use Twitter to do frequent, small giveaways. If a common complaint about your product is the cost of shipping, give out free shipping codes. If the primary concern is the price, give out time-limited discounts. Twitter is ideal for extremely short-term giveaways.
3. Give out a prize that is very valuable. Typically, new technology like an iPhone or tablet is a good choice. This works for any site and works best for raising awareness. Give the prize to someone who follows your brand or shares your posts.
4. "Finish the phrase" or "Caption this photo" contests work for different scales. Submit one for a single day on Twitter and judge it internally. Submit one on your blog and allow the community to vote on the winner. The time limit and the prize can vary greatly.
5. Run a month-long contest on Google +, Facebook, Twitter and every other social site you use. Ask for video submissions and offer a highly valuable prize. You may not receive thousands of submissions, but each one is a valuable multimedia piece for brand exposure.

Did you find this article useful? Yes | No