Making Social Media Work for Offline Businesses

Not every business can afford to be online and in some cases they don’t need to at all. But that doesn’t mean that they will not appreciate any extra advertising and promotions. It may sound surprising, but if you think about it social media marketing can indeed be used to promote a non-online business. Let us look at what Twitter can do for a bricks-and-mortar store.

1. Hold a contest via Twitter. Pick a product you want to promote and advertise in the store window that this product is the prize of a Twitter contest. The rules of the contest should be simple. Tell the people that all they have to do is become a follower of the store on Twitter and make a Tweet about the store. You can now see where this will lead to. Not only are you increasing your offline opt-in list, you are also getting some free publicity for your store every time one of your followers Tweet about you. Keep the promo going for a month before you hold the draw.

2. Dish out code words. Once again pick a product and using your store front, advertise that discounts will be given to those who use a code word when making a purchase on that promoted product. Let the people know that the code word will be Tweeted on a certain day of the week. You will be surprised at the number of people who start following you.

3. Mass Tweeting. Don’t overdo this, but this method will give you lots of attention very fast. Hold a contest for the most Tweets about your store. If you offer a decent enough prize, you will have a flood of advertising on your behalf flowing out on the social media circuit.

4. Build followers. In order for Twitter marketing to work effectively, you need to have a lot of followers. How do you build followers? First way it to post on regular basis, so people that like what you post will start following you. Second way is to follow people who think will be interested in following you and hopefully they follow you back. Your could use some twitter tools that can automate some of these tasks, or you could also higher a company like iClimber that does twitter marketing and promotion services.