How to Use Social Media to Build Your Commercial Fleet Business

Stay on your customer’s radar by growing your online presence

Online social media is all about connecting to customers and building brand recognition.  It gives you a way to deliver helpful tips, friendly stories and insightful ways to use your products to the very people most likely to become your customers – and you can do a lot for free.

It’s flexible, too. You can improve and upgrade your messages at will (weekly is the norm for routine social media postings) for no cost at all, except for a small investment of your time. After you get into ‘the swing of things’ with postings it becomes fun as well, especially when people start responding to your marketing messages.

Commercial Fleets and Brand awareness

Every business wants to be known as the ‘go to’ source for their product. But word of mouth advertising is too slow, and traditional methods are not much faster and cost too much.

Blogs, though, and social media postings let you achieve ‘top of mind awareness’ with the people who matter most, while letting you exclude people who are not likely to ever buy your product or service. Marketing messages that you can target with pin-point accuracy – what more could you ask for?

An invitation from the market for you to send those messages, that’s what you could ask for, and receive. No wonder social media has become the new marketing medium to master.

And, when you later decide to try paid social media advertising, you can even target those messages directly to the customers of your competition. Imagine that. Never before has this level of accuracy been possible in advertising. To learn how to do all that, though, you have to start somewhere.

Tactics That Will Drive Visitors to Your Website

Since social media marketing is worth learning, consider instances you’ve probably used it already. You’ve probably clicked on social media links to websites for more information about products you were not yet ready to buy. Why? Because clicking a link is immediate, it costs you nothing and is a confidential way to shop and gather information.

Tactics businesses use to drive (rather, to attract) traffic to their websites include:

• Offers of free information
• A chance to read the remainder of a story that was introduced by a posting
• Videos of someone using the product
• Videos of someone demonstrating the product
• Videos of someone installing the product
• Photographs of all the above
• Ideas on various ways to use the product
• And more!

The possibilities for attracting web traffic are limited only by your imagination.

3 (Easy) Steps to Get You Started

Even if you don’t consider yourself to be technically savvy, if you can use a cell phone you can start and run a simple social media page for your business. Just follow these steps:

1st, Choose Your Platform

There are dozens of platforms to choose from. You will already recognize the most popular ones, even if you don’t use them in your personal life, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest; the list goes on and on.

Here’s a tip. If any person you would like to sell to regularly visits any social media site, they will always at least have a Facebook account. They might sometimes visit other sites as well to shop, socialize or to network, but even if they don’t use other sites, they will almost always use Facebook.

So, if you are new at this, start a Facebook page for your business and forget about the rest till you gain some experience. See how simple it can be to get a start? Did we mention that a Facebook page for your business is FREE?

2nd, Set Your Goals & Measure the Results

Everybody wants to sell, increase website traffic and create brand awareness, but don’t fall for that trap. In essence, you use social media mostly to offer help, not to make sales pitches. Think ‘invite’ or ‘attract’ instead of ‘proclaim.’

The rule of thumb for postings is that for every four posts you put up, three should be helpful tips and only one should be an offer to sell something. Attract and help, not compel and be overbearing, is the name of the game for social media marketing. The more appealing and helpful that people find your messages, the more they will ‘share’ them with their friends.

Initially you will set goals for the number of people you want to ‘like’ your page. Then you set goals for the number of times people ‘share’ your posts with their friends. You will recognize that sharing as a way of getting referrals.

3rd, Post Regularly

Once weekly is the norm. Too many postings, and you run the risk of people opting out of receiving your messages, even if they don’t ‘unlike’ your page. Be a good guest, but don’t overstay your welcome, just like in real life.

You Don’t Have to be Everywhere.

Like we said, if you are on Facebook you are only one click away from billions of fellow users. That’s enough to get started and to gain some experience. LinkedIn is also a good way to stay connected with people from your industry.

“Follow Us on Facebook” and “Tag” us so We Can Share Your Successes

It’s a new language, to be sure, but it’s a simple one to learn. You don’t even need an in-house expert to start your social media presence. Visit your local bookstore and buy a how-to book on social media advertising.

Happy marketing!

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