This morning we attended a seminar hosted by the Orange Business Partners that covered some social media basics. Their guest presenter, Jon Rettinger of TechnoBuffalo, had some great tips and insight that he discussed, so we thought we would share this information with you.
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| Photo opp with Jon Rettinger of TechnoBuffalo |
First, he said, it is important that we all understand exactly what social media is. In his terms, social media is "the use of web-based and mobile technology to turn communication into interactive dialogue." This means that social media should be used as a conversation starter, rather than as a means to talk at, or sell to, customers. Social media should be used to start discussions, educate people, and get customer feedback. Although some selling may be involved, it should not be your primary goal.
Next, he discussed what he felt were the "Big 4" social media tools: your blog, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Your URL (your website) is the face of your company, and more formal than social media. Your content on your website should be dynamic and should change or be updated frequently, much like social media. However, with social media, you need to update your pages, or create posts or tweets, at least once, if not twice daily. If you are unable to keep up this pace, especially with Twitter and Facebook, then your messaging gets lost amongst the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of posts that are added daily.
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| For All Seasons and Atty Kramer with us at the event. |
Jon's suggestion, for those of us just entering the social media sphere, was to begin with Twitter, rather than Facebook. In order to build an audience using Twitter, he suggested:
- Adding your Twitter account to your homepage and on all of your corporate ID materials (i.e. business cards, letterhead, etc.)
- Your posts should provide value (education, entertainment, retweets)
- You should use a retweeting campaign. You can do this by incentivizing your followers. For instance, you may tweet something like, "The first 20 people to retweet this will receive 20% off their next purchase."
- Tweet 2-4 times/day
- Use hashtags, which are # signs. Hashtags are search terms, so if you use a hashtag for a common search term (i.e. #copywriting) within your tweets, it makes it easier for people to find you who are searching those terms.
- Make sure to "crowd source." This means to ask your followers questions that will give them an opportunity to communicate with you directly.
Jon ended his presentation with the 9 ways he felt social media should be used. They are:
- Public Relations - getting news about you out there
- Customer Support
- Market Research - you can poll your audience directly
- Brand Marketing
- Promotions
- Consumer Education
- Sales
- New Product Development
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
We learned a lot by attending this seminar and hope these tips will help you as well!
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