Start with your Database

So there you are, you've built your website, you have your Facebook page, Google+ and your Twitter pages up and running. But, hold on a minute... where are your followers?

You seem to be following everyone, and no one really seems to be following you. This is not what is meant to happen! You and your business have a lot of interesting things to comment and write about, and no one is reading!

What's the next step?

The title of this post is a bit of a give away. Start with your Database.

The most effective way to build up your followers in Social Media is to write to your own database and get them following, liking and joining your businesses social media pages. You can get your customers to join you by offering incentives through competitions, special price discounts and so on. Once they are on, make sure that the content on there is interesting and relevant and CONTINUOUS. Your followers will soon forget you if you are not posting regularly.

We work with a couple of foodie clients, and one of our associates regularly cooks and photographs recipes with our client's ingredients (check out Dorset Riverford). This makes their Facebook page highly attractive and informative as well as showing customers how those ingredients can be used. eezap.com and it's associates can do similar things for your businesses social media pages. This means that we keep those customers with us and coming back for more.

If you don't have a database, then you need to create one.

This may be a bit of a slog, since it involves some serious market research. Sit down with trade magazines, local journals and so on and find potential clients. You'll then need to go online and grab those clients' email addresses and store all this info on an excel spreadsheet.

Your other option is to buy data from local chambers of commerce and drop those into excel. Once you have set up your database, drop it in to an email app such as Mail Chimp and you are almost good to go. Write the email, click send and it's done. You'll soon see your following grow if you have created the right incentive and messages.

If databases make you go stone cold, then either wrap a warm towel around your head for a couple of weeks and slog through, or get in touch with eezap.com for some help.

Once you have your database up and running it's simply a case of writing to your customers and getting them over to your pages. Again, if you need some help with any of this drop eezap.com a line .

Good luck, Happy Christmas, and Merry Databasing. (Between Christmas and New Year is an excellent time to work up some data!)