Social media is generating a lot of buzz right now amongst marketers and business owners. Marketers who can leverage social media to help distribute business content and increase the overall community of advocates for their business can experience significant growth. Social media allows your customers and potential customers to communicate directly with you and your employees online, and it allows interesting content to spread quickly.
While new social media tools launch every day, most businesses really only need to focus on the major players: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Monitoring Social Media
An important part of leveraging social media for business is to understand what conversations are happening online related to your industry and recognizing where you should respond. Here are some great tools you can use to easily monitor your business and industry mentions in social media:
- Google Alerts: Set up multiple Google Alerts for your company, brand, products, leaders, industry terms, etc. The alerts will get delivered directly to your email inbox at the frequency you indicate (e.g. daily or as they happen) and is a great way to help you track mentions of your brand and relevant keywords on the web on news sites, in blogs, etc.
- Twitter: Monitor mentions of your brand on Twitter with tools like Twitter Search or HootSuite. CoTweet is also a great tool to help manage multiple users on a corporate Twitter account and allows you to assign particular tweets to the appropriate team member for follow-up.
- Google Reader and RSS Feeds: Set up RSS feeds in Google Reader of searches of your brand or industry keywords in other popular social media sites such as Flickr, Digg, Delicious, etc. Scan the results in your reader daily for mentions.
- Facebook Insights: Stay on top of and participate in discussions occurring on your company’s Facebook Fan Page. Use your Fan Page’s Facebook Insights Dashboard (found in the left sidebar when you’re on your page as an admin) to show you stats such as fan growth and page views to gauge your page’s interaction and engagement.
Getting Started With Twitter for Business
Twitter is a social network on which users share short, 140-character messages with each other. Users "follow" or subscribe to each other and can receive messages from each other via multiple technology devices including desktop computers, smart phones, and text messages. As mentioned previously, for business, it is best to use Twitter’s free search engine, Twitter Search to search for your business, competitors, and industry mentions on Twitter. Understanding how and if people are talking about your business and industry will give you enough information to determine if you should invest the time to start and manage a Twitter account for your business.
If you decide that Twitter is right for your business, you can visit Twitter.com to sign up for a free account. Here are a few tips for setting up a business Twitter account:
- Use the name of you business as your Twitter username.
- Use your business logo or a picture of the person managing the account as the profile image for the account.
- Create a custom Twitter background that provides additional information about your business.
- Use Advanced Twitter Search to help determine industry influencers and potential customers that your business should follow.
Using Facebook for Business
With more than 500 million users, Facebook has become the major player in the social media industry. Facebook can serve as a powerful platform for building a community of advocates for your business to help increase word-of-mouth marketing. The first step in leveraging Facebook for business is to set up a business page.
LinkedIn: The Social Network for Business Professionals
The social network businesspeople may be most familiar with is LinkedIn. This network of over 101 million business users and more than 1 million business profile pages can be an important resource. To get started using LinkedIn for your business, it is best to set up and complete a personal profile for yourself as well as a company profile for your business. When setting up these profiles, remember to include all important information such as your website and blog URLs. Additionally, it is important to take the time to make the descriptions for you and your business interesting to read and an accurate reflection of your experience, knowledge, and passion.
LinkedIn Groups
Once you have created profiles, LinkedIn has two major features that are of particular use to businesses and their employees. The first feature you should examine is the Groups feature. The Groups feature allows LinkedIn users to create and participate in discussions around a topic within LinkedIn. Groups can be a great way to make potential business connections, but can also be a great place to share relevant blog content.
LinkedIn Answers
The second feature, LinkedIn Answers, allows you to find people publicly stating they have a specific problem or need that your product or service would solve. Identifying these questions and responding with a resources or a blog article of yours that answers that person’s need can offer a great marketing opportunity for your business. Ultimately, you can generate high-quality traffic to your blog from LinkedIn Answers, and get some really qualified leads as well.
- Use the name of you business as your Twitter username.
- Use your business logo or a picture of the person managing the account as the profile image for the account.
- Create a custom Twitter background that provides additional information about your business.
- Use Advanced Twitter Search to help determine industry influencers and potential customers that your business should follow.
Source:
Hubspot and Bay Area Inbound Co-Branded Guide: "Essential Guide to Internet Marketing".
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