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How could your business use social media?
Do you feel the need to become part of the twitterati and attract the people you want to your business.
By Sarah Norris B.A., Marketing Director, e-blueprint Ltd
The rise of social media and social networking over the Internet has become increasingly popular during the last decade, beginning with MySpace and moving on in recent years to websites like Facebook and Twitter. Each social network appeals to a different audience. Bebo is used more by under 18’s, Facebook’s demographic used to be 16 – 24 but is now getting older; as Facebook gets more well known, Mom and Dad are getting in on it too – pushing some of the younger users elsewhere!
The top five social networks to consider for your business are:
- Facebook (social)
- Twitter (mirco-blogging)
- Linkedin (business networks)
- Ning (create your own social network)
- MySpace (creative & arts led)
These social networking websites have been created so users can connect with people they know by sharing pictures, status messages and joining like-minded groups. This adds a sense of interactivity to the Internet; people can interact with each other, in real time, from the comfort of their computer. This makes keeping in contact with friends and relatives much easier – especially if they live miles apart. Principles businesses are adopting to manage their relationships with their own clients.
As these websites have become so popular all over the world, businesses have started setting up accounts to represent themselves online – as an addition to their corporate website. At first this seems odd – why would you want to network with people you already do business with? Well, as well as the obvious ability to advertise you latest offering or PR event, you are able to communicate more freely, allowing people to get the inside view you of your business and its team, without the formalities normally associated in developing a business relationship. Businesses are successfully using social networking, in particular Twitter, to their advantage, without alienating users with direct advertising.
Will a Twitter account gain me business? Does a Facebook page matter?
Dell (@DellOutletUK) use Twitter as a customer service tool, ‘tweeting’ (or messaging) other Twitter users who come to them with requests, questions, complaints and problems. Dell employ people to operate their Twitter accounts: enabling them to respond to queries on a real-time basis. By responding so quickly to questions and complaints, and at no cost to their customers, Dell are able to create informal, relaxed relationships with customers on Twitter, building a sense of reliability and trustworthiness into their overall brand. Nick Taylor relates this to e-blueprint’s customer needs and says “the natural progression of the internet and internet technologies is towards personalisation of the services, social media tools enable personalisation and relationship management to happen in real time.”
It also gives your business a 360 degree view of how people are responding to you and your offers. The informality of social networking means people are more likely to give an honest, immediate response – something that is lost in traditional surveys or client reviews. You are also to use the theme of the content and messages you process into content for your corporate website. Similarly, if you’re posting news and interesting information to your website, this can be ‘fed’ via your website through to your Facebook page or Twitter account. This integration, once set up, automatically updates when you update on the social network. This means your static website has some dynamic, fresh content – keeping your website alive when you may not have time to update it fully. However, you must make sure the information you post through social media is worthy of being published. Posting irrelevant, boring information will not attract followers.
e-blueprint automated a feed from Steven Hamill’s website to their facebook account, Hamill’s told us:
“Adding all our latest offers in one place on our website and feeding it through Facebook we can connect with people on their terms and double the impact of just adding to the website”
The key to creating a successful social media profile is to give people a reason to follow you. You must provide them with something that’s worth coming back to, again and again. This may be up-to-date information about your business, the latest industry news, status updates for various projects – anything you can think of, as long as your customers can relate to it and use it somehow.
Building these social profiles and feeding the progress back into your business can be time-consuming, so there’s even tools that allow you to update your profiles automatically, through scheduled messages. This makes it a more effective tool for businesses that are not able to delegate time spent on social networking. As many businesses have discovered, it is a tool worth investing in – how could your business use it?
Notes to editor:
e-blueprint Ltd is based at the Liverpool Innovation Park. e-blueprint specialise in online promotion including, search engine optimisation, Pay Per Click (Adword Professionals), email marketing and web design and development since 2004.
For further information please contact:
Nick Taylor – Director
Telephone: 0151 959 0024
Web: http://www.e-blueprint.co.uk
E-mail: nick.taylor@e-blueprint.co.uk
