Social Media: Get it Right for Your Business

June 17, 2011 at 8:36 am

Facebook and Twitter are very popular tools nowadays. Businesses are very quickly flocking to these websites in order to promote their products. Some of them get it right and see their profits soar through the roof due to their social media usage. But it is very easy to get it wrong and alienate your entire prospective customer base. So what can you do to ensure that you stay on the right side of the potentially huge social media customer base?

Keep Direct Promotion To A Minimum

As a general rule, social media users don’t like to be sold things. If an organisation’s Twitter account is simply a list of tweets advertising their products, then no-one is going to follow them. And obviously, that is not a good thing if you’re trying to promote a business.

So the trick for a business Twitter account is to trickle in the promotion amongst other content. For instance, a bookseller’s Twitter account could be populated with news in the world of literature with links to interesting book-related content.

Offer Users Something Extra

One way that a business can guarantee exposure on social networking websites is to offer something extra for those who connect themselves to a business. Companies such as Squarespace have gained massive publicity in the online world by offering prize draws exclusively on Twitter. This method of raising awareness of the company attaches a positive image to your business, giving the impression that you are an organisation that is prepared to reach out to its customers.

Also, providing social media users with exclusive information is also beneficial. If social media users feel that they are receiving insider information as a result of connecting to the business online, then they are far more likely to stay connected, thus making themselves susceptible to the promotional and marketing messages that the business will include.

Create A Personable Image

If a company is able to paint themselves as human, rather than dull and corporate, via social networks, then this can benefit them hugely. If a business is willing to interact on a personal basis with its customer base via social media, then they will see instantly an improved relationship between that business and its potential customers. This relationship can then be used in order to sell products.

Companies that respond to concerns and comments via social media will quickly build up a strong relationship with the prospective customers that reside on these websites. This is especially true if the customers are encouraged to leave these messages of support or concern. If they can do this and expect a reply, it means that conflicts and complaints can often be resolved more easily than if the customer was forced to go via the more formal channels of complaint.

Talk Like A Normal Human Being

It’s amazing how many companies set up a Twitter or Facebook profile and then fill it with marketing and business jargon that the average Justin Bieber-loving social media user isn’t going to understand. If a company really wants to make itself appealing, they need to ensure that they create their personable image (see above) by making sure that the language they use reflects the kind of audience that congregates on social networking websites.

Whether businesses like it or not, social media is an informal forum and so companies who wish to harness its power to draw in customers must embrace this informal nature in the way that they communicate. Obviously, there is a limit to how informal a company social media profile can be, but it is important not to alienate customers with the kind of jargon that they come online to escape from.

Conclusion

So, it is obvious that the use of social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter can be massively beneficial to businesses. As well as being used simply to promote products, social media is a great way to interact with customers and respond to queries and complaints in a way that resolves the situation far more easily than usual.

The use of these sites provides a platform for building relationships between your business and its customers. And that can only be a good thing.