Why Social Media is Important to Your Business

These days, it isn’t enough to have a website for your business: Facebook and Twitter have become a staple in marketing, and it’s time to start capitalizing on it. If your company still doesn’t have a Twitter account or a Facebook page - or if you have accounts that aren't updated daily - it’s time to get with the program and bring yourself up to speed. Here are five reasons social media marketing should be a priority.

1. More people will buy from you.
Not surprisingly, when you stay relevant and active, your customer base is more likely to buy from you. Social media marketing keeps your company or business relevant and interesting to potential buyers, and gives you the opportunity to constantly give them incentives to buy. 

2. Learn about your customers and connect with your audience.
All good businesses know their audience, and, with social media, getting to know your audience is incredibly easy. With analytics on sites like Facebook and Pinterest, you can understand your customer behaviors. This lets you market to your audience better and understand what your customer base wants. 

3. Social media marketing is a (fairly) level playing field. 
Unlike most other traditional ad campaigns, all companies start off on pretty equal footing when it comes to social media marketing. The most successful online businesses are the ones with the most clever, attention-grabbing tactics and the most useful content. 

4. Improve customer service
Social media gives you instant access to feedback from your customers; this insight is incredibly important, as it can help everything from new product growth to customer retention. If there’s a problem with any aspect of your business, you need to know about as soon as possible. With the feedback you get in the process of social media marketing, you’ll know about issues almost as soon as they happen – and you can resolve them right away.

5. An affordable way to market your business.
A fantastic aspect about social media is that it requires very little to do; if you have a computer and internet, you can market on social media. Meaning that in terms of monetary investment, you can do a lot with just a little bit of budget. For small businesses getting started in marketing, social media is an easy and affordable option. But what if you don't have the time to make daily posts on your social media channels? That's where social and Internet marketing companies like CMDS.co come in! We work with you and your budget to create a comprehensive social media marketing plan, post across social media channels for you, and report results.

Simply put, social media marketing is part of doing business. People expect businesses to have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and they expect to be able to use them to get in touch with company representatives. If you don't have social networking profiles set up for your company, you look less legitimate. If your business isn’t already active on social networking sites, now is the time to start. Do you need a social media plan for your business? Contact CMDS.co for a free, no-obligation quote, and we can set you up with a great social media plan that works with your brand or business and your budget!

Changes

You may have noticed that I have not kept up with this blog for almost a year. The reason for that is a number of changes to my personal and professional lives, some good, some bad. Another reason is that blogger.com discontinued support of blog posts posted via FTP to a person's web site. I needed some time to think through the options available to me regarding keeping this blog active and accessible. In the end, I decided to host the blog through blogger.com's service, blogspot.com, so the new url to this blog is http://www.cmdstips.blogspot.com/. (Update your bookmarks!)

But, like all things in life, changes are something that we all have to cope with, at one time or another. Just as I went through some of the most life-changing alterations to my life and world, many people across the globe deal with changes to their lives that touch their businesses, and that includes their web presences. How we react to those changes often defines us and our businesses, if not for ourselves, then for other people, including our customers.

When changes come and we have to adapt our businesses to them, it's important to get perspective on those changes and our reactions to them. Sometimes, the changes are miniscule and customers and clients never notice them. At other times, the changes are huge and require us to be aware of our customers, their wants and needs, and may even involve encouragement, praise, or criticism from our customers. We may even lose a few.

The most important thing to remember is, when changes are thrust upon us, we should look at them not as destructive, negative powers out to destroy us or our businesses, but as opportunities to expand, reach out, be positive, and make positive changes that we may never have had the opportunity to develop without the unexpected change.

Flyout Menus Using Only CSS

One of the things that frustrates those looking to optimize their sites is that, to really do it right, every single page needs to link to every other page in the site. This could create an enormous list of links somewhere on the page that just ain't pretty or functional. Though some sites might not mind it, there is another way. It's not, necessarily, easier, but it is prettier, more functional in more web sites and site designs, and it's still good for SEO: the hierarchial menu.

Clunky name, but they're also known as flyout menus, drop-down menus, et cetera. What happens is, when a user hovers over a link in a navigation area, it highlights like a normal link. It is, in fact, CSS-styled text in an "unordered list." Inside that main navigation, you can have sub-menus where you need them, and those can have sub-menus, and then those can have sub-menus. In all, you can have up to four levels of sub-menus wherever you need them.

There are many places on the web where you can find such a code to use; I have designed a proprietary version that I use for my clients, but, like I said, there are many of CSS flyout and dropdown menus available on the web. Some are free; some charge a small fee for commercial sites or suggest a donation for personal sites.

In any case, this linking system removes all the Flash and JavaScript from the process, making it strictly styled using CSS (linked externally, of course), and all the links as simple text on the site's actual pages.

Next time, a trip into the world of social networking!