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With so many users on popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, they can be great places to target potential customers for your business (as well as keeping your existing clients happy), but this can be an expensive way of getting traffic for your site – both in terms of money and the time it takes to build up effective campaigns. Large companies with enough employees (and ones with the right skills) can easily incorporate social media networking into their digital marketing budget, but what about smaller companies? If you don’t have a huge number of staff – or if you’re just starting out in your business – it can seem incredibly daunting. So what are the options?

Do It Yourself
One way to approach this is to start simple and build up your social media presence over time. You can do this yourself, but it will take a good few hours out of your working week, every week. It isn’t just setting up the profiles that takes time; in order to make it worthwhile, you need to be updating your social media pages on a regular basis. This includes posting statuses and pictures, responding to individual questions or requests, and engaging with both existing and potential clients. On top of all this, there’s also the advertising side. If you haven’t already done so for other PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns, you’ll need to spend time analysing keywords, phrases, and the types of people who use your business in order to target your adverts effectively. This can be incredibly time consuming, and if you do it wrong, it could cost you a lot of money in clicks that don’t turn into conversions.

Hire A Freelancer
Another option is simply to hire a professional web development freelancer to carry out the work for you. Obviously, the downside to this is the cost, but once they’ve done the groundwork with regards to which keywords etc to use in your adverts, you may be able to carry on with the work on your own afterwards.

Pay A Company To Do It For You
Another option – one which some businesses might not be aware of – is to use a company who specialises in doing your social media marketing for you. There are several firms out there who offer these kinds of services, one of which is Social Flow. Based in New York, the start up offers both earned media and paid media options, and have recently raised $10 million in a round of financing. Their services include scheduling Tweets and Facebook posts to reach the correct people at the correct time, targeting users in a specific time-frame in order to generate the most conversions. The main advantage of using a company like this is, of course, everything is done for you. The main disadvantage is that it can cost a lot of money, so only large companies may want to consider this approach. Whatever you decide, it’s worth doing in-depth research into the different options to see which the right choice is for you.

By Chelsey Evans

Follow @AmpheonLtd