Everyone seems to be jumping on the social media band wagon. If you’re like many small business owners, you might be wondering whether you should too.
Perhaps you haven’t explored it at all yet, or maybe you dipped a toe by setting up a Facebook page but aren’t getting much response. What do you do?
Here’s a quick primer on getting started. No, reading it won’t make you the next social media sensation overnight, but you can get a great start in just a few hours and maintain an effective presence with as little as 20 minutes per day.
Here’s how:
1. Establish Your Goals.
This is critical. What do you want to get out of your social media efforts? Why are you doing it? Are you trying to drum up sales or leads? Are you trying to offer another avenue of customer service? Do you simply want to strengthen relationships with customers by being more accessible to them?
Answering these questions will dictate the way you move forward. To boost sales you might be providing information and advice such as reports, whitepapers, or blog posts. If you’re providing customer service, you might end up publishing less content and simply responding to customers when they raise their hand.
2. Be Realistic About Your Resources
Take an honest look at the resources you can devote to this. Major brands like Ford have teams of people working on their social media. You might be lucky even to devote a single hour of an employee’s time to it each day.
Identify who is going to create your content and how your social media presence will be maintained. Make sure that whoever is doing it is doing it consistently and in an appropriate manner. Whoever is maintaining your social media presence will be the face of your company. They need to be able to write well and handle customer relationships with finesse.
The job of social media manager is one part techie, two parts marketer, and two parts PR maestro. You need this person to have these skills and to be on their game.
If your resources are lacking you’ll need to find help (either by hiring a new employee or an agency) or adjust your goals.
3. Understand Your Audience
Just like any marketing effort, you need to ensure your social media campaigns are targeted appropriately. It’s no good setting up a MySpace account if your customers are all on Facebook and LinkedIn. You’ll also need to consider what kind of information they want from you.
4. Content is King. Long Live the King!
Once you’ve completed the steps above, the really hard stuff begins: creating quality, relevant, meaningful, valuable content.
Content always has been king. It always will be too. If you don’t take the time to provide good content, don’t even bother with any of this. Good content must:
- Interest your audience
- Enhance your business’ image
- Be easy to consume and share
- Be valuable and relevant
A financial advisor engaging her audience online has little business in talking about the latest celebrity scandal, unless she can somehow make it relevant to her core message. Similarly, your audience will quickly lose interest if all you’re publishing is hard-sell marketing messages.
Remember, you should be trying to interest your audience, develop an aura of expertise, foster trust, and begin a conversation.
5. Get Regular
You need to check in frequently to your social media accounts. A Facebook page with no updates for weeks, or ignored customer questions will not reflect well on your business. Publish your fabulous content on a regular schedule and check in at least once a day to respond to any comments from your followers.
6. Integrate Your Marketing
This may sound obvious, but some businesses fail to do it. Your social media presence needs to be embraced by your other marketing efforts. Feature links to your profiles on printed collateral such as business cards and brochures. Link from every page on your website to your social media accounts. And of course ensure that your social media profiles include links back to your website. If you advertize on television or radio, you should include the links there too.
7. In Social Media, Everyone Can Hear You Scream
Remember, social media is not private. It is not private. It is NOT private. Be careful what you say.
Social media is a powerful tool. Like all powerful tools, you can do great things with it, or you can lose a limb. Do not say anything in your social media campaign that you would not feel comfortable seeing on tomorrow’s front page of the Wall Street Journal.
There have been frequent gaffes made by politicians, celebrities, and businesses, and in social media they can spread like wildfire. Social media's future is difficult to predict, but you can be sure of one thing: there will be many examples of businesses making idiots of themselves with ill-chosen words.
What do you do if you slip up? Your best bet is to be totally honest and throw yourself on the mercy of the court of public opinion. Admit your mistake, explain what you’ve done to fix it, and promise to do your best to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
But really, it’s a case where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
Get Started!
Alright, it’s time to dive in. Set up your Facebook page. Create a Twitter account. Have fun!
Posted on
Friday, August 21, 2009 3:04 PM