Partner Article

Making Social Media Work For Business

Natalie Kirton, Marketing and Customer Service Coordinator at Help Training Courses, shares her thoughts on how to make social media work for your business.

Some do it really well, others are really bad at doing it, and a few abstain altogether - but everyone’s talking about it.

Social media has become the ultimate business buzz-word of the moment, and it’s easy to see why. Such new communication technologies are becoming increasingly integrated into our lives, and for businesses, they offer huge potential. Having started as a way for individuals to interact with their existing friends and contacts online, the evolution of social media has been a real game-changer for marketing. Now customers and potential customers can communicate directly with your brand in a public forum, and you can post updates to Facebook feeds and Twitter streams that appear alongside their loved ones’ latest news.

Ultimately, such harmonisation of the corporate and the social gives businesses great marketing power; but with such power, comes the temptation to rush for the sale.

It is possible to sell through social media, trust me, but this shouldn’t be your aim. Social media can open so many doors for a business, so don’t restrict your online potential by thinking your social media marketing is all about the hard sell and relentless product broadcasts.

So how do you go about developing a positive social media presence, and sell in the process? The answer is simple – you need to put together a social media strategy.

No matter how big or small your social media plans, invest some time in thinking about what you want to achieve and how you will go about it. If it helps, think about how you would network offline in a face-to-face situation, and how this might transfer to the online world.

When putting together your social media marketing strategy, aim to share content, help others and network effectively. Often conversation develops naturally, so try to listen to what others are saying and contribute in a useful way. Playing it cool and keeping self-promotion to an absolute minimum, you’ll gain a good reputation as a helpful, knowledgeable source.

From this, you’ll build an engaged following organically, and such positive promotion will lead to selling your products and services – not because you sell hard to customers, but because they trust your advice and want to buy from you.

The best way to learn how to make social media work for you is to put together a social media marketing strategy, have a go and monitor your results. Don’t be afraid to try new things to see what works. Try several different social networks to see what works best, update at different times of the day to see what generates most engagement and keep the content you link to relevant but varied. Have fun with your social media marketing and your strategy will develop accordingly. Social media is continuously evolving, and new social networks launch regularly, so keep learning and improving to make it work for your business.

Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences of social media, good or bad, in the comments below – sharing social media thoughts is a great way to generate new ideas and develop even stronger strategies.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .