Remember the days when if you wanted a web presence for your company you simply set up a webpage with your contact info and a little bit of info about who you are and voila!? (Remember too, those early days when it was cool to have some goofy intro page that was fully animated, had dancing images and music and you had to click continue to get to a useful page? Oh was that just my site?)
Then there were the days when SEO was all the rage, not that it’s not important now, but every business wanted content filled to the brim with keywords so that the search engines would rank your site high in search engine results. Everybody’s site read like this: Welcome to Candle R Us, we have the biggest inventory of candles, candle items, candle wicks and other things candle related. If you are looking for candles, candle items, candle wicks and others things candle related — you get the picture.
Now social media has entered the fray and businesses once again are trying to get on the bus. And well they should be. That’s where your customers are and that’s where those customers expect you to be. But what if you don’t have a lot of knowledge or know how on how to position your company in the new social media forum?
Should you delve into social networking? Is it necessary? Yes. Not only that, if you’re not using it, you are missing out on a free or mostly free way to brand your company and using tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is a powerful way to do that. I admit it’s not easy but here are few tips:
1. Take advantage of Twitter and Facebook to post news about your company, specials or events you are having. It can be something as easy as a sale you are having to something as significant as a change in company leadership. Although you’d probably also want to spread that message via traditional marketing as well.
But bigger than that, you want to use Twitter and Facebook as well to start a dialogue with your customers. So don’t be afraid to post about things going on within the company that may be less significant. Let your business personality shine through. For instance you post praises to your employees (as long as they are well-deserved kudos) or mention how great the weather is, where you are. People, and I mean customers here, don’t want to follow corporations on Twitter, so don’t be afraid to be a little more casual online. But at the same time don’t be fake. Internet users are really saavy and will see right through that.
2. Free doesn’t give you the freedom to be cheap. You may want to shift marketing costs here to social media. Maybe you want to hire a social media specialist or contract to someone like us at www.BeachBettypr.com. Make sure that you use social media tools to their full extent. It will still save you money compared to traditional marketing and it works a lot better.
3. Make sure you are keeping tabs on the competition but also on your company’s image. Perform regular keyword searches to find out what discussions are going on about your company, your competition and your industry.
4. Make sure you are not blowing a lot of hot air. What I mean by that is don’t just hype your product, or promote your specials. Give people useful information. Give them something that they can’t get from an ad in the paper or commercial on television. Connect with them. If you are too full of yourself customers will simply tune out and ignore you completely. Find ways to give your customers an experience, to ask them what they want and to give them insight into the people and the philosophy behind your company.
5. Make sure you have a blog. A blog will keep you in touch on a regular basis with customers but in a more indepth way than with Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that let’s you post short messages. On a blog you may want to communicate something of more value. For instance if you own a bakery you may want to write a blog post addressing how to alter recipes for different altitudes. On another day you may want to delve into the differences between royal icing, whipped cream frosting and buttercream. Not only will you be providing information that is useful to your reader and customer but it will help your search engine ranking because those may be topics other web surfers are interested in finding out about.