By Agbolade Omowole

Social media now offers the highest retun on investment as an advertisement media. Don’t let your competitors capitalize on this vast and growing landscape before you do. Smart business people understand that the modus operandi for attracting new clients has changed. They go to the second most visited place on the face of the earth – Facebook. Research has revealed that one out of every six minutes spent online, is spent on Facebook.

Online-marketing

Companies are now building their brands on social media, and I suggest you do that too. The first step towards attracting and winning new customers on social media is by opening a Facebook page. A facebook business page gets your message to your intended users. Here’s how to attract new clients on social media.

* Incentivitize your clients: The most appealing word for your prospects is ‘free.’ Some people like to get free things. Freebies are a great way of attracting new prospects. Facebook fans tend to be super consumers; they spend 43% more than non-fans on average. * Build Revenue Streams: the goal of brands should be customer satisfaction and the bottom line is increasing the profit margin. You can build revenue streams via premium subscriptions, hiring solutions, and marketing solutions.

* Improve Social Capital: Networking, awareness, engagement, trust and loyalty are essential to every business. Your social media strategy should ensure that all these are within your reach in a manner that is fast, affordable and convenient. Linkedln is the best platform for building new professional connections and friendship. It is therefore recommended that you have an expressive profile with good pictures on Linkedln.

*Use Multiple Channels: each social media network has it’s own strength. The dominant social media channel you use should be the one that works for you and produce results. However, you shouldn’t ignore the other channels. The trick is to master one major channel, and make all other channels play a support role.

*Trend on Twitter: trending on twitter alone gets your message to millions of Nigerians in a particular day and how much you achieve with it depends on you. For maximum return on investment, it is better to include your website address in your tweets when your hashtag trends to tell them more about your products/services

*Optimize your Facebook Page: There are a few rules here: make sure your page’s name isn’t generic and does not look very similar with an existing page name. Use your own name in order to be found more easily in search engines. Use great cover and profile pictures. Don’t use the

same picture for both.

*Dimension your cover photos – 851px wide by 315px tall.   Add your company logo, byline and telephone number on your cover photo. It is recommended that the profile should be a professional photograph of you, the owner of the company.  *Advertise using social media: It is believed that doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. No one knows what you are doing. It’s a good idea to invest on promoting your post on Facebbok and Twitter

*Get your demographics right. There are a lot of people on Facebook, but not all of them will need your products or services. The idea is to streamline your advertisements to the target audience alone by specifying their age, sex, and location among others.