Member Article

Social media strategy

There is a lot of hype about Social Media, and how as a business you must be on Facebook, and Twitter, and if you aren’t then your business will lose out. This isn’t necessarily true in reality but you must understand what Social Media could do for your business and then decide what particular medium you want to use to achieve the benefits Social Media can provide. Here are a few tips to help you plan your initial approach to using Social Media in your business.

Stephen Covey the famous motivational guru once said “Begin with the end in mind“ and that is sound advice for a Social Media strategy. What is it that you want to achieve? Presumably most businesses would want to increase their turnover and therefore profit by engaging with Social Media, but if you could break it down a bit further this might be achieved in a number of ways;

- Getting more customers through the door

- Increasing traffic to your website

- Creating new Business to Business relationships

- Developing a web presence

- Giving people a ‘taster’ of your service

All of the above strategies should help grow your business, but before you set up your Facebook page for example, you need to ask yourself is it right for my business, what will it achieve for my business, and more importantly how will I measure its effectiveness and whether my strategy is working?

There are over 180 different Social Media sites listed on the web so it’s important to look at a few of them before choosing which to use as some of the lesser know sites might interest you or suit your business.

Also remember that once you have set up a Twitter account or a Facebook page they will require a time commitment as you will need to keep your pages fresh and updated with new content to prevent your followers thinking you have gone away (or gone bust!), so be sure that you can set this time aside on a regular basis.

Finally, have a look at what your competitors are doing, look for some good examples of Facebook pages and blogs, and then have a play about with the formats you have chosen before you tell people about it. When you are confident you can spread the word, and remember if you don’t use them then shut them down. No presence is better than an out of date presence!

For more information or business support contact NBSL on 01670 813322 and visit the website at www.nbsl.org.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Phil Langton .