The business world is changing. The habits and behaviours of your clients are different now to what they were 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago.

The market that you know is gone and replaced with a new world economy, one which is moving and evolving quicker than you can imagine. It’s time to catch up.

Ask yourself, is your business on social media?  I don’t mean just a Facebook page but is your business on social media sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn?

If the answer is no then you are losing potential business and you don’t even know it.

Ask yourself is your business active on social media each and every single day? If the answer is no, then again you are losing potential business and you don’t even realise it.

Final question. If you are active on social media every day but are only using two or less social media platforms then again you are losing potential business.

The invention of the internet changed forever how we share information around the world.

The invention of social media has changed how we interact with each other and in turn is changing how people do business.

The global marketplace was, until recently, the sole domain of large multinational organisations, but today the global marketplace is in the reach of the average entrepreneur.

Using myself as an example I deliver leadership workshops, including workshops on social media for businesses and within the last few months I’ve trained businesses from New Zealand, East Timor, Holland and of course Fiji.

My latest leadership book was promoted on social media and was sold in places as varied as Japan, Mexico, United Kingdom, India, the United States and all across Europe all using methods that are available to anyone with Internet access.

Imagine if I’m delivering a leadership workshop and I take a picture to post on Twitter.

That image and message will be seen by nearly 4000 of my followers.

Now if just 1% of them decide to retweet that message to their followers and each of them has 1000 followers each then the message has reached 40,000 people and if 1% of them retweet to 1000 followers each then you are now reaching 400,000 people with just one message. It took less than a few seconds to post and all that with one social media platform.

In this article I want to explore some of the fundamentals you need to consider when using social media to increase the profitability of your business.

It would take many hours to fully explain how to build your business through social media but I hope this article gives you a taste of the complexity and the vast opportunities available to every business out there.

Mark Wager is rated as one of the top 100 leadership experts in the world to follow on Twitter. Mark delivers social media training for businesses in Fiji and across the Asia Pacific region. Mark can be contacted at mark@eliteld.co.nz