Social media for your business

In a world full of Facebook and Twitter social networking it's only natural that businesses want to get in on the action and promote their business. But it's a fine line between informative reading and updates to your "followers" to full-out spamming and quickly giving yourself a bad name.


The terms “Social media,” “Web 2.0,” “Twitter” and “Facebook” are saturating the media, and clogging our spam filters. How many emails or ads have you seen that said something like “Millions of people use Facebook every day. Don’t miss out on the advertising opportunity and get left behind?” In fact I regularly get inquiry from clients asking whether or not they should be on Facebook or Twitter.
The basic strategy for marketing using social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, is to build an appropriate network of fellow users. Once you have that network setup you can post messages that will show up on the homepage of all those you are linked to. This can drive traffic to your main website, build your reputation, or just spread the word about your business.

For example an estate agent could post something like “I have a 4bdrm house in London for 500K” and then have a link to the listing on their website. You’d assume people following an estate agent would be looking for a house, so that’s a convenient way of getting the word out for listings, and driving traffic to the main website.

The use for promoting professional services is a little less straightforward. If you just spam your contacts with business promotion, it isn't going to be long before you are unfriended. The use for this type of business is generally going to be creating Tweets on Twitter or posts on Facebook that point to a blog article. That blog article would need to contain useful information and then cross-sell your services. The Twitter stream could be posted automatically to Facebook, or you could create a similar Facebook posting manually, or you could included the blog’s RSS feed in your Facebook account. Which way you use will depend on how much control you want over the individual postings.
If you are selling products, again you would need to write some kind of useful content on a blog, and then cross-sell your product on the article page.
The utility of using Facebook or Twitter to promote most businesses is overemphasized, primarily by SEOs or marketers who see it as a new angle to get some money from unsuspecting business people. The media hype surrounding Twitter and Facebook makes their proposals seem plausible, but in the end, it can end up being a big waste of time.