10 Ways to Leverage Social Media

Build Your Brand, Engage Your Audience and Inspire Sales

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have become powerful resources for businesses to gain exposure online. You can use these networks to build brand recognition, establish expertise in your field, engage past clients, attract new clients, drive traffic to your Web site and blog, and perhaps, most important, make the cash register ring.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of misconceptions about social media. Many view it as a major investment in time, yet most small businesses can manage their networks in under an hour a day. It’s also not about what you had for lunch, what time you take your kids to soccer practice or how much laundry is waiting for you tonight. Propelling mundane details en masse into cyberspace isn’t likely to lead to riches.

As a general rule, the key to success is to be a resource for your audience. Provide information your audience wants, and they will naturally want more. Also, keep in mind that social media involves a two-way conversation. Never ignore your online audience. Instead, engage them, ask questions and respond to their inquiries.

The following are some simple ways to unleash the power of social media and design your own plan for success.

1. Share Compelling Content
Effective social media practices involve engaging your audience, which means figuring out what they want to know and what purpose you want to serve with your posts. Content can come in many forms, including articles, blog posts, video clips, quick tips, statistics, photos, news, industry resources, special offers and so much more.

It’s also important to note that social media can be valuable whether you are marketing globally or locally. For example, a local limousine service could focus on serving as a resource for the community by posting links to upcoming festivals, concerts and events. Be creative! Find out what your audience wants, and build your plans around sharing useful information.

2. Share Information from Other Sources
While you should certainly generate plenty of your own content, don’t be afraid to share content from other Web sites, blogs, magazines, news outlets and other social media users. Remember, it’s about engaging your target audience. When you develop a reputation for providing interesting, useful content, even when it’s content from an outside source, you still benefit greatly.

3. Provide Links
One of your goals should be to increase traffic back to your Web site or blog. You can do this by sharing compelling headlines alongside a link to further information on your site. You don’t need to include links with every post, but do distribute them often. You can also use a link shortening service such as http://bit.ly, which simplifies long links and tracks how many people clicked through to your site.

4. Promote Sales and Special Offers
Retail businesses are expected to share a lot of sales and promotional offers. The rest of us have to be careful to balance the amount of promoting we do versus the amount of useful content we share. For non-retailers, follow the 90/10 rule. Share 90 percent useful content and 10 percent sales messages. This will strike a nice balance as you build your audience.

5. Engage Daily
Opinions vary on how often you should engage in social media activities. Some will tell you to post hourly. I believe in engaging daily, but not forcing a business to communicate more frequently than is comfortable or reasonable. While posting hourly is one way to ensure you get visibility with your audience who may not have their eyes on the social media networks at the same times, it also requires a tremendous amount of work and has the potential to annoy your audience, especially if you are recycling old posts or repeating some sort of automated stream of information.

A better strategy is to commit to engaging as much as possible throughout the day. Share a post first thing in the morning, then check in between meetings and at various intervals to respond to your audience, share new content and get engaged. I’m not an advocate of posting just for the sake of posting. Remember that your goal is to be a resource. Let that be your guide.

6. Don’t Spam
Just because you have added people to your network, it doesn’t mean you have a license to inundate them with sales messages and event invitations. Sending excessive amounts of e-mail or sales messages through your social media profiles can be the quickest way to repel your audience and ruin your reputation online.

7. Take Advantage of Monitoring Tools
New tools are constantly being introduced to enhance the social media experience. I couldn’t manage without TweetDeck, an application that sits on your desktop and allows you to organize your Twitter feed. For example, you can create groups to monitor people whose posts you want to follow closely. You can also use TweetDeck to quickly reply to an inquiry or to send a post immediately to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Another must-have tool is HootSuite, which, among other things, allows you to schedule posts to go out at a later date and time. This can be handy for time-management purposes and to ensure you are adding posts regularly. But resist the temptation to create a constant stream of messages that churn out every 20 minutes. When you send frequent updates without engaging with your audience, people will notice.

Finally, SocialOomph has many features, including a keyword-alert service (similar to Google Alerts) that will send you a daily e-mail roundup of tweets from Twitter that reference your designated key phrases. Set up alerts for your personal name, business name, Web site URLs, book titles and any other phrases you want to monitor.

8. Find Compelling Content
Develop a system for finding interesting information on a regular basis. Follow blogs that you like and social media users who share interesting content, and read industry publications and news channels online. You can also set up Google Alerts to notify you of new content from across the Internet related to key phrases that you designate.

9. Find Your People
Each of the social media networks allows you to search by keyword. Whether you search for users from the city where you live or you search industry-specific keywords to find groups of interest to you, this can be a powerful way to expand your network and tap into people and groups that align with what you do.

10. Cross-Promote Your Social Media Profiles
Once you commit to using social media, don’t keep it a secret. Post links from the home page of your Web site, in your e-mail signature, e-mail newsletters, direct mail campaigns and paid advertising outlets.

Still not sure social media makes sense for your business? Consider this: Your competitors may be beating you to the finish line. For many industries, there is still a tremendous opportunity to stand out in “social media land” and gain a competitive advantage. The longer you wait to get started, the longer it will take for you to gain momentum and reap the rewards. Commit to daily social media activity for six months and see what happens—there is a good chance you will be glad you did.

About the Author
Stephanie Chandler is the author of several books, including LEAP! 101 Ways to Grow Your Business (Career Press). She is also a professional speaker and consultant specializing in Internet marketing and publishing. Connect with Stephanie on Twitter: @bizauthor.

Additional Reading

• Tap into Social Media