The integration of the internet into our every day lives has brought new opportunities for many business but every opportunity also brings new challenges. The “new” social media sites (with Facebook and Twitter being the largest) have brought an audience to everyone’s desktop or smartphone that was previously only attainable for big businesses with unlimited marketing & advertising budgets.
They have also brought customer interaction to every business, this worldwide internet audience is also a place for your customers to air their thoughts and experiences of dealing with your business as well good or bad warts and all so you need a strategy to monitor and respond where appropriate.
The use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter gives you the opportunity to bring customers to your website and real world business as would not have been possible in the past, social media sites can now have a more important influence on customer traffic than search engine results and paid for online advertising and the costs can be far lower.
Unhappy customers now have access to a virtually unlimited audience who they can air their grievances to whether these grievances are fair or not, as has been seen recently in the press attempting to identify who may be commenting on you in the social media can actually cause more harm to your brand than doing nothing so you should always step back, be objective and NEVER EVER fire off a strongly worded response.
Managing your social media presence can be a time consuming task, creating profiles, ensuring they are kept up to date with relevant content to encourage people to follow you or keep on visiting.
Plus you also need to monitor the social media sites for any mentions of your business or area of expertise not only as you can then use this information to further publicise your business but also to ensure you can identify and rectify any issues that may arise.
How are you going to monitor your social media exposure? You could sit in front of your PC/Laptop or smart phone all day constantly checking for updates and new postings but how will you manage to run your business at the same time.
Fear not the growth of the social media has also led to the growth in innovative pieces of software that can centralise the incoming data from various sites such as Twitter and Facebook plus it can also manage your outbound messages as well.
There are several different systems available, two of the largest are Tweet Deck and Hootsuite.
Tweet Deck connects you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more. You can customise your Twitter experience with searches and automatic updates helping you to stay updated. You can see what people are saying about you and join the conversation by tweeting, sharing photos, videos or links. You can connect with your Facebook and MySpace presence from TweetDeck and update your status, posting photos or videos, commenting, liking and groups.
Hootsuite again allows you to connect across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more plus it can publish your website RSS feed directly to your Facebook and Twitter accounts ideal if you publish articles or blogs on your website, no need to worry about remembering to publish across individual sites. You can customise your Twitter experience with searches and automatic updates helping you to stay updated. You can see what people are saying about you and join the conversation by tweeting, sharing photos, videos or links.
Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are just two of many applications that are available to assist you in managing your social media presence. Having tried both Tweetdeck and Hootsuite I have a personal preference for Hootsuite as I found it much more user friendly and intuitive I personally felt that Tweet Deck may be better suited to home use.
Enterprise Host can provide assistance in managing your social media profile please contact us for further information or you can buy online.
