Think about your existing customers, after all it’s a lot easier to sell to someone who likes you and what you are offering. If you can make it easy for your customers to connect with your products and services why wouldn’t you?

There are three parts to this idea of “making things easier”. Firstly, say you own a sandwich bar, you can enable your customers by encouraging them to phone in their order for their favourite sandwich so it is ready and waiting for them. Or, you could give them a loyalty card that can be swiped and tells the customer service person exactly what they like.

Secondly, you need to make sure that your social media presence is where your customers are so they can learn about your phone order ideas and loyalty card scheme. Some customers may be on twitter, others use Facebook or LinkedIn, and YouTube is the powerhouse of the social media-marketing world. Therefore, you need to have leads to all of these networking platforms to capture your customers.

Finally, you still need a home base, by having a personalised website people can see that you and your business are authentic. There are a number of ways that you can manage the flow of information through your social media networks, without spending your life on the computer, and we’ll discuss that in a later blog. Next week we will look at how to use social media to connect with your specific customers.