One thing I’ve come to love is the free word-of-mouth advertising from using social sites, especially Twitter. Twitter offers exactly what I need as far as promoting my business. When I’ve used other social media sites in the past, I immediately noticed the limitation on daily friend requests. Twitter allows me to conveniently hop in on conversations via hashtags, and it’s as simple as dropping keywords at the end of your status update.

Affiliate marketers definitely benefit from social media as it’s basically a free store from which to sell all your wares. You can tweet your inventory and pictures to all of your followers, and it’s easy to gain new followers if you’re adamant about running promos or giveaways. Even if you’re running a local bed and breakfast / coffee farm, tweeting about it and putting yourself out there will get the ball rolling in the right direction.

Billboards are Expensive, Tweets are Free

The thing about traditional marketing is that people have trained themselves to ignore advertisements. We now see the Coca-Cola billboard on the highway as simply a billboard, rather than the invitation to buy a cold refreshing drink. Connecting to your target audience now requires a more personal touch, and social media gives you all that and more. There are easy ways to gain followers if you’re consistent.

• Start a website for product reviews – As an avid beef jerky fanatic, I thought it’d be cool to try all different brands of beef jerky and blog about them. Of course after a quick Google search I saw that numerous websites already existed for the purpose of beef jerky reviews. I may have missed the boat on this niche, but it just goes to prove there’s something for everyone.

• Share funny pictures – Even as a business, you can share funny internet pictures related to your product. Putting funny captions on already popular images such as the ones at MemeGenerator.com are an easy way to be part of an inside joke with your audience. This works especially well for businesses that have a fun, or whacky angle. Always make sure that your messages match the goal of your business.

• Give Incentives for Tweets – If you have a tendency to give away free products as a way of promoting your brand, then take advantage of people’s tendency to share every last detail of their daily existence.  Have them Tweet a picture of them wearing a piece of your homemade jewelry, for example, and encourage them to share the name and location of where they were able to find such choice wares.  Then surprise them with a free pair of matching earrings as a special gift.  I promise they’ll be talking about your business every time they get a compliment on their ability to accessorize. The long and short of it is, if it’s something you’re going to do for free anyway, find a way to get your customers involved in the spreading of the word as well.

As you can see, there are many more opportunities to gain followers online than there are in traditional media marketing. Ads go by so fast in today’s world that we’ve become immune to them, and so online entrepreneurs need to be up on the social media trends as they’re happening. If you need an easy-to-use tool for managing all of your social media pages at once, check out some hootsuite reviews and tell me what you think!

Two months ago freelance writer Rachel Cook embarked on a mission to make a career out of volunteer work, and she now resides on a Kona coffee farm in Hawaii. Her expertise in social media marketing is going to lend a big helping hand towards her goal of managing the farm’s pages and attracting more tourists. Rachel frequently browses the articles from http://goaboutbusiness.com/ for their rich information that she applies to her own projects.