Social Media for business:
In my previous post I wrote about social media sites and how they can be very addictive. Today, I’d like to share with you how social media for business can be very useful for your online or offline enterprise. Almost every large corporate has nowadays a FaceBook page and a Twitter account. They use social media as a branding tool and as a way to gain more customers.
A while back I tweeted about going to France for a vacation and flying on KLM. I was very surprised to receive a reply to my tweet by someone at KLM congratulating me and thanking me for flying with them. Large corporates have social media managers and staff to build their image and connect with their customers. Sure, I will consider them again when flying to Europe.
If social media for business is good for mega companies it surely can be good for small business owners too. Unfortunately, small businesses do not have the same financial resources to employ a team of social media workers and it still can be a huge time waster if not done properly. There are solutions.
Three Ways to Boost your Social Media for Business Results
1) Hire a freelance Social Media Manager.
If social media is not your thing and you have nobody in your company who can take the job even part-time, the solution would be to hire a freelance social media manager. You can do this for a very small budget on Odesk.com with someone from the Philippines. This will cost you around $2-3 per hour to outsource the task.
If you have the budget do it as it will be worth the time you save and your money at the end. You have to be careful though to hire someone that knows the rules and proper etiquette in social media for business communication. Mistakes can be very damaging if you entrust your social media campaigns with the wrong person.
HIRE SOMEONE HERE
2) Concentrate on three or four social media sites.
If you concentrate on three or four important social media sites like FaceBook, Linkedin, Twitter and Google plus, you can develop a presence in one hour a day. You can learn how to do this yourself or have an employee who naturally is addicted to social media do it for you.
Daily status input, liking, commenting and sharing is necessary to produce brand awareness and grow your customer base on the long term. We are not talking here of bombarding people with your advertisements, but building a relationship with them sharing useful information related to your business.
What social media for business can also do for you is to give more social proof that people endorse your products and services.
3) Use social media tools to automate the process
This is my favorite option as I still enjoy participating in social media activities. Below are the three tools or services I use personally in my own business.
a) Onlywire
Onlywire is a paid service that will submit your status posts to 13 social media sites. You must of course, prior to using the service, create an account with all social media sites and also set-up a profile consistent with your brand in all of them. This process can be very time consuming, but when it is done, it is done. You will be able to submit your content in one click to all of them.
You also have the ability to set-up your blog’s RSS feed in Onlywire and each time a new post is published, it is sent to all the social media sites and bookmarking sites, which in total reach +50 sites, without having to logging in the system. Doing this you will have more traffic going to your blog and some Do-follow back-links. If you want to go a step further, you would have to interact with the friends or connections you have on these networks, but unfortunately this can’t be done automatically.
That’s a great social media for business tool.
b) SocialAdr
This is a Free and Paid social media and bookmarking exchange service. This means that as a free member you submit the bookmarks of others to your social media sites and others do the same for you. This is a good system as your content is not always posted on your own social media sites, but on others. This is an opportunity to reach new audiences.
If you take a monthly membership or buy credits, you won’t have to submit others’ content. You just will have to enter the bookmarks you want to be distributed. SocialAdr can submit your content to 29 sites. If you start as a Paid member you won’t even have to create accounts in all the social media and bookmarking sites, that’s the advantage of this service.
Using them, you will receive more traffic and back-links, but it will do little for your branding. That’s still another great social media for business tool.
c) Sokule… is so cool!
This is a Free and Paid service. If you are serious about your social media for business marketing, you should definitely upgrade to a paid plan. This will enable you to brand your business and get huge exposure. Sokule is a business social media platform and you can connect with people that have the same interests you have and find not only customers, but partners.
Click on the image above to visit my profile
On Sokule you can post in many different ways:
- A short post of 140 characters.
- A medium length post of 500 characters.
- An article length or, as long as you like post, on Sokwall.
- A welcome post to all members on Kule Wall.
Not only your content will be posted on Sokule itself, but from 2 to 80 social media sites depending on the paid plan you have with them. Not only your content will be distributed, but it will be pinged, which is a huge advantage.
There are so many other good stuff with Sokule that I can’t write them all here. Maybe another time. Sokule is my preferred social media for business tool.
So, do you still think Social Media is a time waster?
If you haven’t started your social media for business campaigns, do it now!
Want to learn more about Facebook Marketing and Facebook Ads?
Take the Facebook course or read the book.