Recently I attended a workshop organized by Apple. It was brilliant, and it was like learning the basics of social media all over again, which was a good thing because I learnt new tricks, tips, and the good thing is I’m going to share it all with you!
Start from the very definition of social media: a platform for building online communities of people who share the same interests or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. That’s easy. Via platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon, we connect with already existing friends or make new ones based on common interests, mutual friends, or similar thought patterns.
Social media is a never ending conversation between people facilitated by technology. Note that I did not define social media as Facebook, or Twitter. They are means to an end (communication) but not the end in itself. Meaning that your business could be subscribed to all the media that exist and still not be getting any results (yes, it is possible).
It's more about the people than the tools
Why do you need social media for your business?
Just in case you’re not convinced your business needs social media, consider the following:
- It is a conversation that more people are joining every day. Take Nigeria for instance; the rate of growth of social media and social media users has more than tripled in the last two years. In August 2011, Nigeria ranked the 15th fastest growing country on Facebook globally. This latest statistics puts Nigeria in the #35 position in the world ranking on countries on Facebook.
- Public perception has moved from being influenced by traditional media to being more personal. Therefore, people tend to care more about what their friends and family tell them about a product/place/personality rather than what traditional media would tell them. Using Nigeria again as an example, where is everyone these days?
Thing now is, how do you exploit that definition to suit your business? The following simple tips cut across any platform your company decides to employ.
- Establish your brand voice: your page should SCREAM your business, all the time. That’s what you got the page for isn’t it?
- Separate the person from the brand: except you’re starting out with a name like Richard Branson, separate the business from your personal affairs. So, no personal pictures of your family on vacation on the page, or hanging out with your old school friends. No. No. No.
- Be transparent; let your goal be known from the get go: if you’re a social enterprise, commercial outfit, political organization, let your audience know from the start. There’s nothing worse than your first few clients feeling deceived. Their fury will make that of a woman scorned look like child’s play!
- Imagery is powerful: text is boring, especially when it’s a lot. Especially with blogging; try to break up the text with pictures, a video, info-graph, whatever.
- Allow comments and respond to them: it is not communication if there is no feedback, how are you sure your audience understood what you put out? How do you know if they had any trouble using your service? How do you receive praise or criticism?
- Link and link often: not only does it enrich your website/post, you could use it to barter sometimes. Have a conversation with website owners before you link to their site, see if they’ll return the favor. If they only agree half the time, that’s still more FREE publicity for you!
That’s it for today; the next parts in this series will dwell on best practices for using Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, in that order. Leave a comment if you’ve got a question, query, contribution, or if you just want to say hello!
