Getting Your Business Ready for Social Media

Social media is used increasingly by more and more people. Social media can be used effectively by your business. Before deciding which social media platforms to use, you need to decide which business objectives you want social media to help meet and who will be responsible for managing and administering your social media resources.

There are a number of different ways that social media can be used. They include:

• Promoting products and services.
• Getting feedback from customers.
• Providing thought leadership in your industry.
• Monitoring your firm’s reputation.

Why should you get involved? One good reason is that your competitors are starting to use it.

Who should be involved? A senior company executive or advisor needs to be responsible for it. Responsibilities include developing the social media plan, creating the organizational structure to support it and assigning responsibility to manage and maintain it.

Where should you start? Before you start, you need to decide which objective or objectives you want to accomplish. It is prudent to identify one objective initially. As you become comfortable with the results of this initial effort, you can experiment with different approaches to gain confidence and experience. Once you start to see results from the initial effort, you can start to think about subsequent objectives that are important for your business.

How should you get started? You can either have a staff member assigned or you can outsource part or all of the functions to others. It is a function of time and money. Discuss potential uses of social media with key members of your team. This would include both employees and other key advisors to your business.

One of the keys to using social media successfully is to provide consistent, timely communication between you and your customers. You should then create a social media plan. The plan will define how you want to accomplish your objective. It should also identify the:

• Administrative policies and procedures.
• Management responsibilities.
• Metrics used to evaluate effectiveness.
• Social media platform(s) used.
• Tools used to monitor metrics.
• Frequency of dissemination of information.
• People who will provide content.
• Company executives who will monitor it.
• Staff members designated to respond to posted comments.

Once you understand what is involved, you can make intelligent decisions about implementing it in a cost-effective manner.

Conclusion

There are many ways in which you can get your business involved with social media and there are so many different possible social media channels from which to choose, that it behooves you  to do your homework before you make a determination about which ones you feel will work best for you. You have a world of social media options laid out in front of you. However, there is one option that doesn’t exist for you and that is choosing not to get your business involved in social media at all. You are sadly mistaken if you think that your business will prosper just as much if you don’t get involved with social media. Because of the simple fact  that everyone else is involved in social media, you need to keep up with them. Otherwise, you will be left behind.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. If you are unsure where and how social media can be used in your business, we can help. For a free assessment of your online presence, and to discuss your objectives and how social media can impact your business, let's have coffee.