To stay current with your competition, use social media to your advantage; many businesses do not do this. They don’t understand how much money they can make using social media. If properly used, you will find yourself with more customers for your business. The following article offers some helpful tools that will show you how to begin a successful social media marketing promotion.

Keep your blog entries fresh and exciting to entice your readers. If your content is updated frequently, the reader will know when you’re about to put up new content to check out when they return later. This is very much like how consumers treat traditional content providers like newspapers and magazines. Be sure to post consistently so that visitors will return to your site.

Be careful when hiring a company to handle marketing via social media. For starters, their black hat techniques are often seen as spam and will degrade your reputation. Some of these companies use fake YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts by using proxy servers with automated registration bots. Because these services use abusive tactics, your message is generally not seen by too many real people, as the view counts are fake and the fraudulent accounts are generally terminated fairly quickly.

Put a Facebook “like” button on the homepage of your blog, in the top right corner. Readers can easily “like” it and it will show up on their page. Having this directly on your blog lets your visitors “like” you without having to leave your page. This simplifies the process and gives more people exposure to your business.

Until you have a better grip on what social media marketing works for your company, you might have to borrow some ideas. Take a look at what your strongest competition is doing, and model your early efforts after their most successful tactics. Look for clues about which promotions seem to be most effective and how different customers react to different approaches.

Keeping finding new ways to get in touch with your customers. Comment on their blogs and social media statuses, if you think that to be appropriate. This does not mean jumping in on a personal exchange, but it should be aimed at issues that are relevant to your product or service.

You can combine email marketing along with social media. Add in a Facebook or Twitter button near the end of your email, and include a blurb about how you strive to personally respond to any posts on either of these sites. You could also encourage people to join your newsletter by posting a link to the registration page for instance.

Take advantage of the ability to advertise on social media sites by finding out what advertising options they offer. Know how each social networking website is different in order to make the most of each one. You may find you get better results from one site in particular, and choose to devote your time to that one.

Take advantage of a free account with Yahoo Answers to promote your product or services. On this site, users can submit questions for other users to answer. Read through the questions and provide your products as solutions where possible. You will quickly achieve expert status if you consistently provide good answers in a specific category.

Professional etiquette is very important on social media sites. Introduce yourself personally, but always keep a professional tone. Avoid responding to negative or argumentative posts and delete posts and comments you find offensive. To engage with your personal friends, make a separate Facebook profile. Don’t do it through your business profile.

You might have noticed that many Facebook ads contain attention-getting images, which are often created by editing photographs. It is a clever idea to use such intriguing images because this will draw the possible buyer to your ad. Once you lure them in, they will be more likely to click through to your site and buy one of your products or services.

Using the tips above can help you have a fool-proof marketing campaign that uses social media marketing to stay on top of the competition and possibly overthrow them. Stay up-to-date with new trends, and do not hesitate to try new things.