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Social media and online networking
Social media is firmly established as a networking and marketing tool. And many small businesses are finding that a presence on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or Facebook is opening up new lines of communication with customers. But the digital world has not replaced other forms of marketing communication. Instead, businesses now have to ensure that they engage with customers wherever they would like to be found, both online and off.
First steps with social media
It’s vital to develop a social media strategy that’s right for your small business. We can help. Our guides, checklists and case studies can show you how to get the most out of social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
We’ve also got checklists that will help you write blogs.
Get started with our simple guides
Our easy to follow “get started” guides can help you set up your small firm on Twitter, LinkedIn, SunZu (previously Ecademy) and Facebook.
One of the first jobs is to describe yourself or your company. Before you start, take a few minutes to read this guide:
• Ten tips for creating an engaging online profile.
The next step is to build up followers and you can learn more about that in Gemma Went’s excellent article, Finding your audiences on social media
Employing a social media consultant
If you are thinking of working with an outside consultant to establish your social media strategy, read Six questions to ask when recruiting a social media expert.
And have a look at this case study about Bath Ales. The West Country brewery employed a social media consultant to get them on the right track and that strategy paid off with increased sales.
Learn the rules of the game
Social media can be risky business. Make sure you protect your brand and keep within the law by reading Legal, decent, honest and truthful — is your online marketing up to code?
It’s also worth drawing up your own guidelines if several members of staff are tweeting on behalf of your business.
Make your social media work harder
It’s common for small firms to start out on sites like Twitter and Facebook and then to lose momentum. If this sounds like you, we have got plenty of advice to make sure you maximise the opportunities that social media sites offer:
- Rethinking the way you tweet: how to get more clicks
- Getting the most out of your LinkedIn group
- Ten ways to expand your social media contact list
- Q&A: Social networking to boost your business
- IT Donut offer: download your free social media toolkit
- Action List: How to use Facebook to promote your business
Find more articles, videos and tools in the Resources box on the right.
Social media toolkit
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Comments
There is a potential pitfalls that you need to address that you may not have considered, namely your employees. If your workforce are active as individuals on social networks and they have indicated in their various profiles that they are employed by your organisation there is potential for their posts, tweets, blogs and recommendations to be associated with your business. It is essential for organisations using social media for marketing to have an acceptable use policy in place for their employees, which clearly gives guidelines for personnal use of social media where there could be an association to your business (or a conflict of opinion). Most existing acceptable use policies do not specifically cover social media only generalisation about internet and email use. If this is the case, get it updated so that a stray employee profile/post/blog etc. on a social site does not undo all your hard work.
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