Active Social Marketing
Social Networking sites are the new IN place to be.
Have you stopped to think how this can be of benefit to your business?
Well, it can be a bit tricky but we hope that by the end of this article you’ll have learnt something about it and will be better placed to carry out an online campaign.
The big spender approach is of course, pay your way through, but that’s not always the best course of action.
Here are some of the tools online marketers presently use for social networking promotion:

Company profile page (Facebook has free "Facebook Pages" for commercial profiles).
Use this as your presentational page, where you’ll provide more info about your company and products with status update feeds. Use this as an opportunity to inform people about new features, discounts, product promotions etc.
Product or Corporate Groups
Create groups for product benefits, for product usages or in general for your company. Use the community that you create for increasing your brand awareness, positive perception and returns. Provide incentives for participation.
Events
Use event functionalities from social networking portals to inform people about new products in your catalogue, product releases, product promotions etc.
Polls
Use the polls functionality for getting feedback and building customer-centric perception.
Portal marketplaces, (like Facebook Marketplace).
Use these parts of the social networking sites to add your company and/or products

For companies that don’t use ActiveReception, that’s where it ends...however...for those of you with ActiveReception, this is where it begins.
When you have the ActiveReception live chat capability, you can take these efforts all the way to conversions, here are a few ideas...
1. Place a direct link to chat from your profile/group/event, etc (using ActiveReception) to one of your sales staff to correspond with your opening hours, or if you run a full time call centre, all the time. Through this you can receive feedback or lead people through their decision process, right there, at the time when their interest is peaked. More traffic, more orders, no additional resources required.
2. If you direct people from, for example, Facebook, to your site, formulate an Active Makering Campaign in ActiveReception and send chat invitations with customized content. “Hey Facbook friend, how can I help you today?”, for example.
3.You can also monitor and invite visitors to see where they clicked to arrive at your site, then follow their footprints and determine from all this how how effective your social networking campaigns are...then continue to tweak and refine them as you capture more and more business.
