Businesses should make better use of Facebook & Twitter

In a world where Internet is used on a daily basics everywhere, it’s a surprise to me that businesses today aren't utilising social media to increase brand awareness.
We just converted to digital TV, so surely the transition to social and digital marketing should be well underway. Well, some people I spoke to simply don’t like to use computers or they just don’t have the time. No excuses, you should make time. Interesting yet alarming new figures show that Facebook now has over 1 billion active users. That means that one out of every seven people in the world has a presence on the network. All this opportunity is not to be missed by businesses.
Facebook and Twitter can be used to promote a business on a massive scale if it’s done right. It’s important that you have your Facebook page set up as a business page and not a ‘friend’ page. This means anyone has direct access to your page without having to send a request. Once you have set up your Facebook page correctly you can make use of the ‘insights’ tab. This can tell you, which of your posts have been more viral, and how many people it actually reached. 
Another way to drum up brand awareness and get the consumer engaged it through running competitions. But be careful, Facebook has strict regulations regarding running competitions through Facebook. This is mainly to do with gathering data and the Data Protection Act. 
Twitter is a short and sweet method of promotion so you have got to make it punchy. Tweets have a very short shelf life and need more attention than a Facebook post. 
If you’re in the retail industry you may want to take advantage of fashion bloggers. A blog is a short story posted online by users who have set up their own site. This is actually really easy to do and is also free. Customers can leave comments and share the blog on other social networking sites. The power of the fashion blogger is not to be underestimated. Get it right and they essentially promote your product and business for free, get it wrong and they can run you into the ground! If you provide bloggers with a product to test they will do a write up and post it on their blog and their followers have direct access to this information. WordPress blogs are the most common blog site used and there are 70 million of these bogs worldwide. Northern Ireland has a massive fashion blog industry so get goggling. 

If you aren't really confident about his digital area and social media then why not get someone to do it for you or even show you.