Using social media to market your business

Social media are internet services that let you interact with others and share and create content through online communities.

Social media present great marketing opportunities for businesses of all sizes. You can use social media to:

• promote the name of your brand and business
• tell customers about your goods and services
• find out what customers think of your business
• attract new customers
• build stronger relationships with existing customers.

Advantages of using social media

Social media marketing has many advantages:

• broad reach – social media can reach millions of people all around the world
• ability to target particular groups – many forms of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) allow businesses to target specific groups, often in particular locations
• free or low-cost – many forms of social media are free for business, and paid options are usually low-cost
• personal – social media allow you to communicate on a personal basis with individual customers and groups
• fast – you can quickly distribute information to many people
• easy – you don’t need high-level skills or computer equipment to participate in social media. The average person with a standard computer should have no difficulty.

One of the harder task for Social Media Marketing is to actually post to each Social Media Provider and managing them. Today we will talk about using a WordPress Plugin call Digital Media Combined (DMC) to help you post to the many Social Media Providers such as Facebook, Google+, Instagram, etc, without the need to log into each separately. Below are the instructions to follow so that you can make use of this wonderful plugin as well:

1. First thing you need to do is to log into your WordPress, go to Plugins -> Add New. In there search for the plugin “Digital Media Combined.” Once you have found it install and activate it.
2. Once you have installed the plugin, you will need to add your social media profiles to it. In this example, I will go through the process of adding a Facebook Page so that you can post to it using this plugin. The process is the similar for other social media providers. On the left hand side, you should see a new menu “DMC”. Click on it and then go to “Social Media Profiles” as shown in the image below.
   You can see there are different social media profiles that you can add. Before you can authorise DMC to manage your Facebook Page, make sure you are logged into the Facebook accoutn which has admin permission to manage the Facebook Page. Now let’s click on the “Add a Facebook Profile” button. This will redirect you to Facbook to get authorisation for DMC to manage your Facebook Page.
   
   Click “OK” for both of these permission. Once you have approved DMC to manage your Facebook Pages for you, you will be redirected back to your plugin page to select which profile you want it to manage. These are all profiles your Facebook account have permission to manage. In most cases you will only have your standard Facebook profile, and a Page profile.Select the ones you want the plugin to manage/post and click “Save Profiles”.
3. After adding the profiles go to DMC -> Dashboard. In the dashboard, you can start posting to the social media profiles. You can select to make the posts immediately, or schedule to have them posted at a later time.

We will continue with some advance features of this plugin on another blog post. Please install this plugin and test it yourself as it will definitely help with your social media marketing strategy.