Any business professional can benefit from using social media to attract new clients and engage existing clients. This goes doubly or even triply so for web designers. It’s likely that many of your competitors already use social media to target potential new clients and with good reason. The majority of your target market already uses social media to some degree and will probably use the internet and/or social media when searching for a web designer. If you’re not using social media at least as part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a major marketing opportunity.
The Most Basic: Simple Promotion
The most basic and common way web designers use social media to get clients is by simply promoting themselves or their companies on the most popular social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Using these sites, you can link to sample pages that demonstrate some of your capabilities. You can also use these sites to link to live websites that you’ve worked on in the past. In addition, many professionals, including web designers, offer special discounts to social media users who follow or like their business’s page, and they use social media to promote special deals and giveaways.
Creating Webinar Tutorials
Savvy business professionals also promote themselves by creating quality content like webinars and video tutorials. As a web designer, you can create webinars and tutorials that show what a high-quality website that you’ve built can do. On one level, you’re creating a sales pitch for your service. However, that doesn’t mean you still can’t offer quality and useful content that helps and entertains viewers. You can demonstrate and discuss the differences between a good website and a bad one, or what makes a website great rather than merely average. You can also show and talk about what features make visitors want to stay, look around your site, and find out more about your business. Compare those features with the qualities that make visitors abandon sites within the first ten seconds. You can also give advice to viewers about what potential web design clients should look for in a designer and what qualities they should avoid.
Linking Social Media Pages to a Blog
Blogging is one way to get your name and your content noticed on the web. It helps your business with SEO simply by existing. All you need to do is update content related to your business semi-regularly. If you have a blog, connect your blog to your social media pages. Post links to your new content when it’s up; this makes your social media followers aware of your new content. Just as with webinars and video tutorials, be sure that you’re providing content that’s useful and of value to your target market. One of the main activities on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus is the posting and re-posting of interesting, entertaining and humorous content. Even if existing clients make up all of your followers and friends, if even a handful of them re-post your blog links, that can lead to potential new customers.
Create Detailed Profiles and Fan Pages
Many people don’t do this, regardless of what profession they’re in. Whether it’s because they don’t want to take the time to fill out the profile section of the site or they don’t know what to say about themselves, they’re making a big mistake. When people browse through profiles or sites, especially if they’re already in the market for a particular product or service, they do read or at least skim the “about me” or “about this business” section of the profile. Use this section to talk about your experience and link to live websites showcasing your prior work if you can. Fill in as much information as possible, and aim for 100% completion if at all possible. Some readers will skip profiles or “about” information that’s only partially complete.
Use Designer-Specific Social Media
Besides the big names, many smaller social media sites exist that get used and searched by designers and people looking to hire designers. Post links to some of your work on design sites that behave like Digg, such as Designfloat.com, Designbump.com and WPVote.com. If you earn top ratings, your work gets shown on the landing page of the site, effectively reaching tons of potential viewers. You can also use design promotion sites like deviantART and Coroflot to promote yourself and get useful feedback and constructive criticism from other designers.
Conclusion
For any small business owner or entrepreneur, social media sites offer a free way to market to a myriad of potential customers. As a web professional, you’d be a fool not to take advantage of this opportunity. While you certainly can’t go around spamming users or attempting to market with no strategy, a number of creative and successful ways to market yourself exist for social media outlets. Often, these methods aren’t complicated and simply require you to post or re-post work you’ve already done. In the case that you market by creating new content, you’re still only investing a small portion of your time and paying nothing to potentially reach a very wide audience.
Know Your Guest Author
Hugh Yearsley is a freelance writer with a penchant for search engine optimization. He enjoys sharing his insights on various marketing blogs. Visit the WhoIsHostingThis webhost search engine and review service for more information on webhosts.