It can be very easy or very difficult to start an online business depending on what service or product you are selling online. A couple mainstays of course are twitter.com, Facebook.com, Pinterest.com and your own customized or template-based social media site through an e-commerce host.
There are also over 500 other social media sites, Flickr, Tumblr and numerous others. The trick is to dissect how these sites relate to your business in terms of media groups. Like television stations each social media group has a different defined audience, however this is a little more open sources than television. So your goal is to determine what sites best serve your potential audience. Easier said than done of course.
What you will need is a list of what technologies you want to acquire for your business and rank them according to desire or more importantly functionality to increase the productivity of your online site. Also, just like magazines subscriptions, websites change and their audience can change throughout the year depending on the season. The best thing to do would be to pick 5-10 sites that you believe are relevant to your potential clientele and learn the technologies of each to make that work for your business specifically.
Once you have a defined list you can remove ones best on ineffectiveness of cost/return structures after a trial period. The trial period is up to you and will vary and your goals for effectiveness and actual results achieved. You will have to monitor this on a weekly basis as you can begin to understand trends and analyze what works for your site and business and what does not. You can control the direction of your social media plan and develop increased clientele. There are numerous companies that can help you and I would suggest to look locally, consider your costs and the timeline of your specific goals.
A good basic outline is as follows for you social media business development:
Business and Social Media Sites
What are the 5-10 sites that will affect my online business development?
How will I use the specific, individual technological advantage of that site for my business?
What sites will I use in coordination with others and how will this help develop my overall business structure and message?
How long of a test phase am I going to use for each social media site?
When will I know I have reached the target I set out? I.E. How will I quantify it, in terms on numbers or rationality or a "raison d'etre", (meaning)?
Once I have completed a successful social media plan outline that is expanding, how can I monetize it and start to add employees to the social media department to assist with expanding my online business?
Technology Pieces/Sites Needed
What future technologies will I need in the next 3-6 months to expand my business locally, regionally, globally?
What costs are involved with these new technologies?
Are there better performances models coming down the pipeline in the future, so maybe I should wait until the next version comes out?
How will this affect my business in the short term?
How will this affect my business in the long term?
Are there other people I can partner with to reduce cost, timeline or increase the growth of the company moving forward?
All these are key questions that you need to ask in developing your online business for expansion. The structure, sequence, strategy will vary from industry to industry and depend on your team. In a future article, we will discuss the 4 s' of online social media development.
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