Why use social media for business?

1. It’s an excellent way of connecting to your customers where they are and what they are saying about you.



2. It’s a great way of reinforcing existing client relationships and building new ones. Businesses can share knowledge and information easily on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, consumer forums or via Twitter.



3. It’s the quickest method of communicating key business messages to a wide range of people. Corporate Twitter accounts are a great way of broadcasting company news instantly and concisely.



4. Crisis PR: it can be vital to managing corporate reputation, messages and keeping people informed when things go wrong.



5. Twitter is excellent for driving visitors to your website and corporate blog.

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Arthur

Why use Twitter?

Twitter is often referred to as ‘micro-blogging’ as it is used to share views and opinions quickly and concisely.

And there’s no doubt that it’s effective: it currently has 3.7 million UK users, an increasing number of which are businesses.

But why has it become so popular and why should you be using it?

Twitter accounts are useful because they:

• Are excellent for disseminating your news stories quickly – When you log in to Twitter, how many times have you seen a Tweet from someone saying that they’ve seen a celebrity a few minutes before at a station or an airport? The point here is that Twitter is instant. Type in a short message, share it, and everyone following you knows about it immediately. Think of it as like sending a text, but to lots of people.

• Have the potential to reach influential people and groups – Worldwide, it’s estimated that around 106 million people or organisations have Twitter accounts: that gives you a potentially huge audience. Try to follow as many people/organisations as you can, but if you’re a business, be strategic – focus on finding similar businesses, clients, subcontractors or decision-makers who you already work with or are targeting – don’t just follow everyone and anyone.

• Create a sense of community – A crucial thing to remember when using Twitter or any social media tool is that online, people congregate around areas of interest rather than demographics. It’s an excellent place to meet and engage with like-minded individuals or businesses.

• Can be used to comment on issues relevant to your industry – If there’s an issue or topic that’s current in your industry, Twitter is a great place to air your views and also find out what your contemporaries think too. Find something topical, Tweet it and ask your followers for their views – the more regularly you do this, the more likely you are to get a response.

• Are a great way of sharing best practice – If you’ve found a method for doing something successfully that can help others, Twitter is an easy way of sharing it. For example, if you’ve put together a presentation about a particular subject, you can send a link to it out on Twitter so that everyone can see it.

Five tips on how to improve your search engine rankings

While most of us find websites through search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, but very few of us will look beyond the first two pages of search results. That’s why you want to make sure that your site is up at the top.

Five search engine optimisation (SEO) tips for improving your rankings on the internet:

1. Think carefully when selecting your keywords. Before you make your website live, you’ll need to create a list of keywords and phrases about your product or service. For example, if you sell shoes, this would need to be one of your keywords. However, lots of websites will have this as a keyword too, so choose a phrase with two or three key words which are relevant to you.

2. Include plenty of text content. Search engines find it difficult to pick up Flash content, but they love text. Try to use 100 or more words per page on your site, themed around your keywords or phrases.

3. Use your keywords frequently – between three and eight times per 100 words is usually recommended. And don’t forget to include keywords in your headlines or subheadings!

4. Add links to your site. Links help search engines to navigate the pages of your website, so make sure you have plenty littered throughout your site. A good place to start is by creating a home page which includes links through to other pages within your site.

5. Ask other sites to link to you. Try to get your links to your website on sites that are highly ranked by search engines. This is vital – search engines regard links to your site from other pages as a vote. The higher their search engine ranking, the more valid the vote is. Google has an application called PageRank which you can download to help you with this.

Social media is great for business if you have a strategy

Social media is becoming hugely important in business marketing yet few companies understand it, let alone know how to use it effectively. Creating a company page on Facebook, LinkedIn or a channel on YouTube will not help you win friends and influence people if you don’t know which social media platforms your customers use and what they use them for.

Social media is a communications platform which allows you to be highly targeted in your selling messages and reach exactly the right people you want to make friends with - that's if you know how to use it. And in the current climate, it should be an integral part of your marcoms strategy not an ‘after-thought’.

So, if you want your ‘Tweeting’, ‘Facebooking’ and social media activities to work for you, here are a few things to think about:

1. What are your aims and objectives? Who do you want to engage and communicate with and what do you want to say?

2. What social platforms do your customers / prospects use and what online communities do they participate in (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn and Ecademy business forums are going to be more useful if you are a B2B organisation than Facebook)?

3. Tailor your key messages to the people and businesses you want to reach and tell them something useful and valuable to them.

4. Be social and don’t try to ‘preach’ or ‘hard sell’. This is about building long-term ‘friendships’ with people you want to do business with.

5. Most importantly, communicate consistently, truthfully and regularly with customers and prospects – it’s key to building trust, confidence and a profitable following.

Why should I incorporate social media into my business?

Up until a few years ago, the term ‘social media’ was unheard of. Today, it’s inescapable. If you’ve got a Facebook or MySpace page, a Twitter account, or you regularly log on to YouTube to watch videos, you’re taking part in the social media revolution.

The rapid rate at which the use of social media is increasing is astonishing. YouTube is now reportedly the second largest search engine on the internet with 2.6 billion search queries a year – an incredible statistic when you consider that it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. In short, you can’t ignore it.

There are many reasons why social media is becoming ever more important within the business community. Firstly, it’s an excellent way of reinforcing existing relationships. Many businesses which want to share information can do this easily on Facebook or via Twitter.

It’s also the fastest method of disseminating your information to a wide range of people. Corporate Twitter accounts are a great way of broadcasting company news quickly and concisely. If you post a Tweet, it’s there in the public domain immediately for everyone to see.

Twitter is also excellent for driving people to corporate blogs. By including teasers of your blog entries in your Tweets, you can generate interest and encourage your audience to view your blog in full.

And thanks to YouTube, incorporating video content into your operations can be done with the minimum of fuss. By simply creating a YouTube channel, you can host all of your videos in one place and invite your audience to come in and take a look. It also means you don’t have to slow your website down by using it to host 200 megabyte videos.

But how do you make it work for your business? By following a few simple steps, you can use social media effectively.

Plan ahead – Before you start incorporating social media into your business activities, think about why you’ve chosen to do it and what you want to achieve. Most businesses which are unsuccessful in integrating social media fail because they have no idea what they want to get out of it.

Measure your success – In the past, one of the main criticisms of social media was that it was virtually impossible to measure its success. However, it’s now much easier to do this by seeing how many friends you have on Facebook, how many followers you have on Twitter, or how many views your YouTube video has had. If you’re using social media to try to generate more hits on your website, you can use a programme such as Google Analytics to monitor website traffic.

Know your audience – It’s important to remember that online, people congregate around areas of interest rather than demographics, so ensure you know your audience and give them content and topics that match their interests.

Be different – By all means, look at what other people are doing in terms of social media campaigns but making your Tweets, Facebook page or YouTube videos different is the key to success. For example, if you’ve got a blog, choose an interesting subject to focus on which nobody else is commenting on. Better still, find somebody with an interesting take on a particular situation to write the blog.

Key words – Finally, it’s essential to include as many of your key words as possible in your descriptor on your social media pages as this will improve your search engine position. The more of your key words you can incorporate into your Tweets and Facebook status posts, the better. It’s also important to remember that you need to revisit your key word selection regularly and fine-tune it to ensure that your name stays at the top of popular search results.