How to get your business involved in Social Media

Submitted by Karen on 11 Jul 2010

It is difficult to know where to start with Social Media. There are so many different resources and guides that I thought I would start off with a couple that we have found useful here at www.flightcrewfinder.com

Twittfaced covers how Social Media came about and the tools that people use to engage with others. It offers useful suggestions for businesses on which social media tools a business shouldn't really live without.

Viral Loop looks at harnessing Social Media to make your brand "go viral". Viral Marketting out performs standard marketting every time and if you can create a campaign that taps into the mood of the moment then it can increase your sales by astonishing amounts. There are some really good case studies in the book including the one where a couple of guys used bottles of Diet Coke and Mentos mints to create a spectacular show with coke/mint fountains - see here to watch. It discusses how Mentos used the viral video to increase sales and re brand whilst Coke missed out on the hype.

Which Applications should I use?

There are many Social Media tools that can help you and the ones you choose to use will depend on your business, market and goals. For example, there is no point registering your business with Four Square if you are an online business like us.

At a minimum you should:

Sign up for Google Alerts. Here you enter keywords (your business name and variations thereof) and Google will alert you every time it is mentioned on the web.
Register business accounts with all the (relevant) major Social Media players - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Four Square etc
Integrate your website with Social Media. If it isn't already, get your website set up to post to Twitter, update your Facebook status, post to LinkedIn when there is new information. If you need help achieving this, our developers Ice Shadow Studio have extensive experience in this area.

Other considerations:

Get a blog going. It is a good way to give your customers information about what is going on and to keep things current. If you haven't got one already then a blog incorporated into your website is far better than an external "Wordpress" blog. For more information on this and Seach Engine Optimisation see Ice Shadow Studio.
If you have users registering on your site then make use of API's such as "Facebook Connect" for users to sign into your site. It takes away an extra registration step and they trust facebook with thier information.
Transfer your website commenting system to one like Disqus. Disqus is social media for comments and it integrates your comments with all the popular solcial networking tools allowing users to easily comment, share and post to profiles. They are also easily able to subscribe to rss feeds on the comments.
Social bookmarks. Enable one of the many social bookmarks tools on your website. Let users share the posts they are interested in with their network / others. Let them digg, tweet and post to their hearts content. It will bring more brand awareness and help you connect with new customers.
Set up RSS feeds for people to subscribe to. With more and more of us using mobile devices feeds are a quick and easy way for people to get information. Sign up to a service such as FeedBurner that tracks how many people have subscribed to your feeds.
Send out relevant, targeted newsletters. Invest some time in the design and content and make sure not to "spam" people.

There are lots of resources that you can use to help integrate your business with social media and I have created another article called Social Media Resources that lists the resources and how to make the most of them.