Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and many other social media sites have an increasingly dominant role in communication today. People are conversing in real-time, and they’re connecting with friends, family and business like never before.

If you use these networks effectively, you can personally connect with your target audience. With an engaging social media strategy, you can capture revenue from this growing marketplace.

From teens to baby boomers, there is a social network, web site or community for every one of us. Facebook users alone spend more than eight billion minutes a day on the social site virtually connecting with other users and brands. If you are not participating in the conversation online, your customers will not find you – they will find your competitors.

Facebook

Across the board, Facebook is the most important network for businesses which sell directly to customers and for political entities and candidates looking for online support and activism, ultimately driving sales and political contributions (and get-out-the-vote efforts!).

Facebook boasts more than 800 million active users, and more than half of them log in to Facebook every day.

Businesses can improve their relationships with customers online through Facebook, as well as using the platform to drive sales of particular products and services. When businesses truly “join the conversation” on Facebook, the results can be incredible. Take a look below at what some of the “best of the best” are doing on Facebook — and what we’re doing to bring small businesses up to the same level:

Political groups and candidates can get out their messages via Facebook, and the social media site has been cited as a key factor in running a modern campaign — not a replacement for traditional campaigning tactics, but a way of augmenting that and driving online activism. We encourage candidates to use Facebook heavily to take members of their constituency behind the curtain, personalizing candidates to help them be seen.

Many modern candidates have also used Facebook as a powerful tool to build their e-mail lists, indirectly but powerfully augmenting their overall donor numbers. Businesses can do the same!

We also build custom Facebook applications! Learn more…

Twitter

In politics, Twitter is the realm of the hyper-engaged. You won’t raise money here (at least, not much), but there’s still a tremendous amount of value to be had. Reporters and bloggers often look at Twitter to determine a candidate’s relative level of support. If you’re not engaging on a daily basis on Twitter, you’re likely losing valuable earned media opportunities.

On business’ behalf, we use Twitter, alongside tools including Hootsuite, Sendible, and others, to drive online traffic and generate leads. For example, a hotel located near an airport could watch for checkins via Foursquare (a location-based application for smartphones which integrates with Twitter) and ask people who have just landed at the airport whether they’d like rooms. A company which paints homes can look daily for people on Twitter in a particular location to mention that they need to paint their house, then ask them if they’d like a free quote. These sorts of uses can have a tremendous financial impact for a company — but only a few use Twitter effectively.

Companies which are well-established can also use Twitter to mitigate customer complaints, responding to those and helping make customers happy online.

The bottom line is that only the truly engaged succeed on Twitter — and while very few companies use it effectively, those that do can see benefits almost immediately.

Be sure to follow us online at @RedBlueMedia!

YouTube

YouTube is the second-largest search engine, and it’s an important tool for businesses and politicians to be on. If you aren’t creating content on YouTube, particularly if you’re a politician with a significant following, others will — and not always positive ones.

Thousands of businesses have attempted to create “viral” videos, and while that’s an admirable pursuit, no one can promise your brand a viral video (and certainly some brands lend themselves more to “viral” videos than others). Nevertheless, if a video goes viral for your brand, you can expect to see substantial increases in traffic and — in some cases — significant increases in sales.

We create custom videos to order, and we also help manage their YouTube search value (to the limited extend which YouTube allows).

Here are a few great examples of viral videos placed by both candidates and companies:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be a tremendous resource for hiring professionals, and in some particular cases can be a great place to start a company’s web presence online. It works the other way as well; individuals and companies alike can use LinkedIn to find new leads, conduct business sales, and connect with other businesses (particularly for business-to-business sales models).

We do not recommend LinkedIn as a platform for politicians or activist groups.

Other Social Media Outlets

On behalf of our clients, we often do work on other social media sites which, depending on the specific business, can be vital to success:

• Yelp: Most useful for restaurants (and catering most to their needs), Yelp is still a valuable source for leads for other local businesses. We manage reputations on Yelp, helping to push down negative reviews (which often are left by competitors) and drive up positive mentions. Our end goal is to ensure that the companies we work with are found as often as possible on Yelp, and that means ensuring that a Yelp profile is as complete as possible.
• Google Places & Google Maps: These two systems are integrated to the point where doing work on one often is doing work on the other. Businesses with storefronts, particularly those offering location-specific services (e.g. car repair, restaurants, attorneys, and any other businesses which people may want to visit) need good reputations and presences on these sites. We specialize in maintaining positive mentions for companies on these sites, as well as offering Google-specific specials. These simple steps often lead to significant leads for local businesses.
• Bing Local: While Bing is not the largest (or even the second-largest) search engine, it’s still important for businesses to put themselves on the map here. We can get your business started on Bing.
• Yellow Pages, Superpages, and other directory services: While the usefulness of each of these platforms is debatable in terms of driving traffic to your site (the vast, vast majority of users use Google instead to find businesses to work with), they are still valuable in terms of Search Engine Optimization. In specialized cases (moving companies are a good example), specific directories can be quite useful for lead generation, and we have a growing database of these sorts of sites, which we add businesses to as part of an overall monthly package.