Next time you’re in a public place, take a look around you. How many mobile phones do you see? I bet the answer is “several”. Most likely, people aren’t talking into those phones. They’re probably staring at the screens – reading the latest tweets, posting to Facebook, checking in on Foursquare, or spying on their circles on Google+.
If your company doesn’t have a social media presence, you’re at a serious disadvantage. To the people who are glued to their phones, you may as well not exist. Fortunately, it’s easy to get started in the world of social media. If you make 2012 the year that you connect with your customers, it won’t take long to establish a presence, and before the year is out you’ll find yourself wondering how you ever managed without having such an easy and convenient way to reach your customers.
Social Media is About Engagement
When you first get involved in social media, it’s easy to get carried away; to post too often, or to think of social media purely as free advertising. This can be a very damaging mistake. Social media is about conversation. Your goal should be to talk to your customers, to answer their questions, to ask them questions, and only occasionally post advertisement.
In the early stages, it’s best to pick just a couple of networks to be very active on. You should join all the networks you can think of. Or, if that’s just a very short list, ask an online marketing agency to sort out the important accounts for you. Set up those extra accounts to point to the main accounts such as Facebook and Twitter.
If you expect to have a large number of followers, then you may want to hire a social media manager to look after your accounts for you. A social media manager will be able to answer questions, find interesting topics to talk about, and pick the right times, and the right frequency, to post advertisements.
Smaller, local businesses, may be able to manage their own social media accounts, but companies that have customers in more than one time zone, or that cater to a large number of customers, are probably best off enlisting the help of an online marketing agency.
If you do try to manage your own account, the most important thing to remember is that your posts, once put up there, are instantly visible to the entire world. If you regret something, you won’t have time to delete it – it’s already out there and has probably been seen by a lot of people. Don’t post anything that you don’t want associated with your brand. That means, stick to positive messages. Avoid getting involved with flame wars, and avoid politically charged messages unless your brand wants to be associated with a specific political stance. It’s all too easy to let things get personal on the Internet, but when you’re posting as a brand, it’s wise to keep a professional distance.
Written by Amy Fowler, social media manager at online marketing agency, Boom.
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