Social Media For Your Business

Before becoming active in Social Media, you might want to consider what each site does and how it can benefit your business. It’s important to take some time and analyze what your existing social media strategy is. Try and figure out which sites and tools are best for your targeted audience. Without a fully developed plan for your social networking activity, you could end up wasting a lot of time.

Here are a few basic questions to ask yourself when forming your social networking strategy:
1. What are the needs of my business? Hopefully, you’re not putting your company name on a social networking account just to send messages back and forth to former high school classmates, so there has to be a driving force. Figure out what your needs are. Are you short-staffed? Is your advertising budget running thin?

2. What am I using the site for? After you’ve established your needs, consider the primary goal of your social networking strategy. Do you want to recruit employees for a certain department? Do you want to market a new line of products? Do you want to connect to more people in your industry?

3. Whose attention am I trying to get? If you want to market that new line of products, for example, you still need to know your target audience for that product; and with more than 1 billion users on some sites like Facebook, you’ll need to narrow your focus.

Once you have answered the above 3 questions, consider these questions:
1. Which sites do I want to take on? If you have enough staffing power to handle multiple social networking sites, that’s great. If not, it’s important to focus on one or two, or you could spread yourself too thin and fall victim to the ‘gaping void’ perception, where you end up going days without activity. Your followers will notice.

2. Who is going to manage your page?Would your social networking activity fall under a current employee’s responsibilities, or do you need to bring on new talent? If you ever find yourself without the staffing resources to manage your page, don’t stick your head in the sand. The solution is easy. Get some interns. In most cases, they will do it for free as they earn college credit.

3. Who has access to your page? What type of trust level do you have established at your company? Will all of your employees have access to the social network account, or a select few? Take the time to assess the skills and character of those who can log into your page. You may run into delicate situations down the road – especially when dealing with ex employees.

4. Who is going to be the face of my page? Does your company already have a public representative that usually handles speeches, press, etc.? It may be beneficial to utilize that person as the voice of your social networking site. People buy from other people, not from other companies. In order to solidify trust, pick someone to represent your brand.

After you’ve answered those questions, you can choose which social networking site, or sites, would best fulfill the requirements of your strategy. Though many of the sites are similar in nature, they can all be categorized by the different purposes they serve. These are the basic types of social networking sites:

1. “Free for all” social sites: Some sites that fall under this category are Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and Pintrest. Each of these sites primarily serves as a nexus of friends and associates who want to socialize. The profiles are usually personable, inviting, and can be customized with add-ons and apps.

2. Professional sites: Examples of these include LinkedIn and Plaxo. The professional site can be utilized as an online professional contact database, or “rolodex,” but it’s also where people go to update employment information about themselves.

3. Industry-specific sites: These sites allow you to connect to people who are in your industry. I-Meet, for example, is specifically geared toward event planners, while ResearchGATE is a community for researchers in the science or technology field. Industry sites help you to narrow your search when looking for services, or people with skills in certain fields. You may even want a particular department of your company, such as IT or advertising, to open an account on one of these sites.

To read our free eBook on Social Media for Business, click here. It’s a short easy to read guide that teaches you what you need to know to plan your marketing better.

At TheHomeMag, we are always looking for different ways to help you grow your business. We now have magazine racks up at seven locations in Orange and San Diego County. Click here to see.

Happy Marketing!

–Kimberly Estrada, Publisher
Please call 949.478.5991 if you have any questions.