Social Media to Promote Your Niche

I just wanted to talk about my last take-away from the AIM Conference and then I will never speak of it again. OK, never is a long time but it will definitely be a long time before I speak of it again.

They had a session on Social Media called the Authetic Web and one of the participants asked how they could use social media to promote their specific niche. The presenters quickly suggested that the participant should start a blog to try to reach out to their customers. They talked about how a blog can help develop a conversation with your customers and promote goodwill. I thought that was a good answer but it only represented part of what a site could do to promote with social media.

So I spoke up and talked about how in addition to creating your own blog you can approach existing blogs within your targeted niche. For example, the participant was offering courses in IT, engineering and other specialized skills. I suggested that they search for some engineering blogs or forums and start participating in the conversations. Once you are a member of the community is easy for you to make suggestions on different educational avenues or even to ask others what they think of a certain product or service. An extension of this idea is to offer a free course to the main author of the blog or forum. If the author is pleased they will write a review or a recommendation of your product or service which is an excellent endorsement.

Social media is the new word-of-mouth advertising. The Interent is full of product reviews both positive and negative. If you have a great product or service, start talking about it online or get others to talk about it online. You are no longer limited to the local economy; ease of communication and faster global delivery can make your product or service available to everyone.