I see three forms of social media that can be used by businesses for permission based marketing.
You must realize that intrusive marketing and spam is dead – in fact, it doesn’t nothing more than make people mad. Why??? Because they didn’t ask to receive your information.
Permission based marketing opens up a whole new door for businesses to market and promote their products and services. If you have an audience of people that have said, “Yes, I want to receive your information”, then you have a powerful group of, in essence, pre-qualified customers.
So how does social media help businesses with permission based marketing?
I’m going to present 3 social media tools that businesses can right now that are both permission based marketing systems, and even better, they are 100% FREE!
Blog
A blog is can be used by a business for permission based marketing since:
a) people will either search, or be referred, to your blog and then they decide whether or not to stay on your blog to read your content.
b) most importantly, people can subscribe to your blog – either via RSS subscribers, or via email. It’s these people that have not only read your blog, but have taken it one step further and said, “I want to receive more information from you ” and “I want to know each time you update your blog”.
This is how a blog becomes a powerful marketing tool for a business. As the audience of subscribers grows, so does that businesses influence, marketing reach, and probability of increasing loyal customers.
Twitter is a revolutionary platform that is new on the scene of social media. However, for a business, you have the opportunity to build a large audience of followers – those who chose to receive your updates.
With Twitter, it’s through the voluntary process of followers following you that you, as a business, achieve permission based marketing. Since people have just as much of a choice to follow you as not follow, you are guaranteed that your message will only reach those people who want to hear from you.
Again, Twitter is a powerful permission based marketing tool for business – so make sure you’re using it.
Facebook Fan Pages
There are now two types of Facebook platforms for users to use:
1) Facebook Profiles: here’s where you send friend invites, receive friend invites, and select only those people who you want to associate with. This is the original Facebook platform, and typically used by family, friends, associates, etc…
2) Facebook Fan Pages: here’s where permission based marketing comes into play for businesses. FB Pages are most used, and most valuable, for business, products, services, events, etc…
Facebook Fan Pages are powerful permission based marketing tools because, much likeTwitter, your updates are only going to those that voluntarily decided to follow you (or become your fan on Facebook pages).
Your fans (or followers… whatever you wanna call them) on Facebook, also just like Twitter, are what I like to call “pre-qualified prospects” because of the permission based element – people don’t have to follow you if they don’t want to, and those that do are making a conscience decision by saying that they want to hear from you.