In Nielsen’s 2012 annual Social Media Report, they reported that Americans were, collectively, spending more than two billion hours on social media sites every month.
With 212 million Americans using some form of social media, businesses (both small and large) cannot overlook these sites when coming up with a marketing plan.
Here are a few tips to nail your company’s social media presence:
1. Plan Your Strategy
With so many social networking sites to choose from, each with its own style of conversation, you’ll have to come up with a plan in order to be successful. Before you make your first post or tweet, you need to decide which networks will work best for your company’s product or service, and how you’ll use those networks to keep your name in front of customers.
2. Choose Your Networks
On that note, you should choose networks with a format and style that will work for your business. For instance, if you have a service-oriented business that doesn’t lend itself well to a photo format, you’ll want to stay away from Pinterest. But if you sell a tangible, specialty product, Pinterest may be the perfect way to keep people talking about it.
3. Take Care when Crafting Content
You can’t just toss out a link to your product or service at regular intervals and expect people to be engaged. If your Twitter feed is full of links to your products, with no conversation or other interaction, other users may view your profile as spam. Take the time to craft lively, useful content for each network — and share content created by others if your followers will find it useful.
4. Tailor the Message
You also shouldn’t post the same content to every network. Your Twitter feed should look different than your Facebook wall, and both should have content other than just links to your company blog or products. Ask and answer questions on Twitter; create polls and video content for Facebook; and engage with your readers on your company blog.
5. Share the Love
If all of your profiles are all about you, all the time, you’re going to lose followers faster than you gain them. No one wants to hang out with the guy who talks about himself all the time, and it’s the same with a company’s social media presence.
Think about what your customers need, and what information they crave — and then help them find it. Post a link to an interesting news article about your industry, or re-tweet a customer’s link to her blog post about her great experience with your product.
Navigating the ever-changing social media landscape can be confusing, and you don’t want to build a bunch of profiles, only to see them lie dormant and neglected.
But if you have a plan from the start, you can make your company’s social media presence a success.
About the Author: Angie Mansfield writes about a range of business topics for a variety of sites, includingReputation.com.
I have 2 brothers who I love and admire greatly. They both have 2 children, and do more traditional jobs than I do. One is a public school teacher, and one is a salesman. They both work really hard, and they are really good at what they do. They are amazing guys – and amazing men – and their legacy will be their children.