For anyone who wants to be noticed, Social media should a top priority. Besides offering the opportunity to engage with your audience and allowing you to find the right audience more easily, it is significantly less expensive than advertising through traditional media. Social media has become a part of everyone’s life and is something that influences daily routine. It now plays a big role with how people interact with each other and is something that is not slowing down anytime soon.

Whatever your reasons to develop within Social Media, we will find out what you need to know to improve and increase your confidence or add a new skill to your CV.

Social Media is now entrenched in our every day business and personal lives, and proving to be an incredibly powerful tool when used appropriately for building brand awareness, increasing Sales through ‘content’ not ’advertising’   and delivering real time Support and Customer Care.  It is about visibility and adding value to your brand not a direct sales channel but can indirectly increase sales incrementally and improve your credibility…  Social Media is a FREE business resource that can be used in ways that suit your business.

• Special Offers
• Event visibility
• Sector news
• Outage updates
• Product releases
• Support information
• Free customer reviews
• General company news
• Getting your business noticed by others in your sector and gaining new business

This type of medium offers consumers an intimate look at your brand - if your strategy is managed by a ‘combination’ of the right people within the business it can bring really positive results.   It is more than just a marketing tool and it’s worth sharing the responsibility for the creation of content:  Listen to your own people, they often have the best ideas!

• Marketing – Social Media was BORN for Marketers  …
• Sales - Post real time updates of new features, special discounts –  links to download centres
• Technical Support – Deflect known issues or tier 1 type questions with canned responses from your Chat application or knowledgebase
• Product Development- your Product Managers will have a valuable new insight into what your customers really want
• Customer Services – Your customers will let you know when something is right or when it’s wrong… you have the opportunity to pick up their issues in real time…so you can fix them in real time.

Twitter – this is a tool that offers a catchy headline and encourage followers to visit your site for more meaningful information or you can simply retweet headlines to your followers that you think may interest them.

Facebook - Creating a group on facebook can also assist with your SEO  strategy.  The links ‘should’ be contextual/have anchor text (text relevant to the landing page). Posting an article on a Facebook fan page, a blog, particularly one that is indexed in Google Blogs is regarded as being worth far more than 1000 links on directories. 

LinkedIn - The Social Business network platform is utilised by both companies and individuals who want  to be informed and connected with like minded peers.  It’s a valuable business platform for raising your own company profile and is used by businesses globally to interact, trade and engage with like minded individuals or companies that can add value in some way.  It is popular with high profile recruiters as they benefit from accessing a huge database of  potential candidates to proactively market sector targeted roles.

You Tube – Anyone is free to embed videos on their blog or Web page. You don’t even need to be a member of YouTube.  Each video page contains the html code that you can copy and paste. So create your own marketing video, embed the link on your website and offer your customers a more in depth product demo or simply more about your business generally.

These are all unique platforms but offer you the same opportunities and The Online Consultancy can set up and manage your accounts on your behalf or train your staff to manage them interally.

Social networking can also complement your SEO strategy and improve ranking by providing internal and external link building to your site from the Social Media sites listed and You Tube.

Social Media is instant, irretractable, irrefutable and should be approached in the same way as any other campaign.  Don’t mix it up with your personal life – but be relaxed by all means.  Try to turn criticisms into something positive; regard and respond to it as valuable feedback on your products or services.   If there are immediate changes you can make which are reasonably quick and cost effective … do it and turn the criticism into praise.  Continue to use this feedback for your product development or wish lists and let people know you are taking their suggestions and feedback seriously.

You can start simply and use it for company news, product updates or link to relevant trade news articles with a one liner; that can be enough – try to keep it up to date or keep the content generic.  We can help you set up links to your Group on Facebook, Twitter feed; LinkedIn and add a blog or forum to your website to get you started in the world of Social Media.