Social media is a conversation online – real people sharing facts, opinions, experiences and passions. People are talking about you and your industry on the World Wide Web and you need to be part of that conversation.
In a nutshell, here are our top tips on using social media for business:
Engage with your followers, ask them questions and respond swiftly to questions they ask you.
As a business, you should engage with people through mediums such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs to engage, listen and build a relationship with existing clients and potential customers.
Give people what they want – information, advice and help to solve their problems.
A company Facebook and Twitter page and a blog will offer a platform to share information and advice and build up trust that leads online users to look to you as an expert in your field. Being real, relevant and authentic will increase your reputation, helping to build a following of potential clients.
Be careful not to only talk about your company and its services, and certainly do not over-sell; people don’t want to hear this.
Post on your social media pages regularly.
Social media must be regular, consistent and promptly responsive. PRG recommends posting on Facebook one to three times a day, on Twitter three to seven times a day, and uploading a blog at least once a week.
Embrace outside experts and re-tweet, blog about and link to other people’s information.
It is important to not only share your own advice but to link to other sources of information, it will bring added value to your audience.
Make your posts easy to share.
Social media is fantastic viral marketing, if someone likes what you’ve written they’ll pass it on, who will in turn share it with their friends, spreading the word about your business – that’s free advertising. It’s therefore important to include relevant sharing buttons to give people an effortless way to pass your content on to their friends.
By using social media for business you could achieve higher search engine rankings (as Google likes fresh content), leadership and authority, differentiation from your competitors, customer interaction and loyalty, and potential new business.
These tips only scratch the surface on the hundreds of social networking sites out there, but as a business this is a great place to start.
To see how the experts do it, follow PRG on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to our blog.
For more information on why your business needs a blog click here to see my last blog post.
