Seven steps to successful social networking for business

Leslie Garrett outlines how to structure your business involvement with social networking sites to ensure your organisation gets the most out of it.

When is the right time to jump into social networking initiatives and why should you research several sites before settling into just one?

Many firms are holding back from getting involved with social networking sites because they believe today’s popular sites are just a fad that will pass. Sites that are popular today will have to evolve or they may indeed fade and lose their lustre. Barring evolution, new ‘must have’ networking outlets will emerge to satisfy social networking needs in business. Think of today’s big buzz social networking websites like a wave that you can choose to ride or let pass. If you miss this one, rest assured there will be another – but rather than waiting for the wave to pass, there are plenty of good reasons to investigate and consider getting involved today.

How extensively you get involved with social networking initiatives hinges on how these initiatives align with your firm’s goals. Your firm may want to leverage a site like Facebook to create a client group, post news, share client success stories, or post YouTube videos of client testimonials and demos. For any firm sending out e-newsletters, or client communications, creating a chat group or client networking group on these sites provides another outlet for sharing important content that may otherwise get buried if it were delivered as an e-mail message.

The goals for involvement in social networking initiatives can vary from support for public relations and marketing initiatives, to a sales communication tool for prospects, or a networking tool for clients, and more. Follow these helpful tips to better understand and manage social networking initiatives.

Conduct your own investigation
Before you determine whether or not to invest resources or any energy into creating a business profile and joining a site, investigate the leading sites and kick the tyres. Consider Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and Plaxo as four of the top networking sites to investigate.

Select social networking opportunities that support business goals
Not every site is going to be a fit and align with your firm goals. After your investigation, consider starting with one site, and limiting the time and resources to manage the site. Assign one person the task of building and managing your firm profile.

Aligning your business goals with social networking initiatives should also include defining whom you ‘friend’ or connect with in a network. If the purpose were to share e-newsletters and client-centric content, it may not make sense to connect a non-client outsider. Likewise, if goals included building a network for clients to encourage sharing of best practices or peer-to-peer problem solving, leveraging a resource like Twitter makes little sense because Twitter limits posts to 140 characters.

Get the word out – and if needed – educate your clients!
Introducing a ‘chat’ group on Facebook for clients makes little sense if your clients have no understanding of how to create a profile or get connected. Additionally, many may not want to get connected if they do not recognise a direct benefit for investing their time in a network forum on a site such as Facebook. If you decide to start a client group on Facebook or another outlet, educate clients with a ‘how to join our Facebook forum’ handout, provide click-by-click instructions, and highlight a list of benefits of being involved with your network forum.

Structure or limit the time invested in managing a social networking site
Whether responding to posts, making connections with people, or adding content to your profile, stay consistent by making regular updates once or twice weekly. I strongly recommend scheduling 15 minutes on your calendar one time per week to maintain each site. If not calendared and time-bound, posts can become random or the amount of time spent on a social networking site can easily spiral out of control.

Avoid getting personal, overloading content and resist begging
No one really wants to know if you are sitting in an airport or if your garden has weeds. When posting as a business, be informative, educational, and get to the point. With sites like Twitter, users are limited to 140 characters, which force the user into a sound bite format for delivering content. When connecting through a site like Facebook, visitors can be over-stimulated or lose interest if postings become loaded with excessive clutter.

Resist the urge to beg for followers. If you regularly post quality content and make weekly connections with your targeted group, eventually the word will spread and new followers will stream in. You can add to your email signature line a Facebook, Linked In, or Twitter address – however, avoid including a signature line that states ‘follow me on Twitter’ this can come across as sounding desperate.

Avoid posting on what may be sensitive topics
Events will unfold in the industry or within a competitor's business that may be highly tempting to post about. Resist the urge to make statements on these topics. You risk turning off prospects and clients in the event the topic is being monitored or highly sensitive to them. The safest approach is to stay neutral, be informative and remain professional.

Google, search engine optimisation and measuring the impact of social networking
To improve rankings in Google and other search engines, some firms are tapping into search engine optimisation gurus for advice, while others are simply asking their employees and clients to set the company website as their homepage, thus opening the company site every time the internet is accessed. There are many ways to improve your company’s rankings, and there are distinct benefits to building RSS feeds from social networking sites into your homepage. While improving your rankings in Google can seem much like the quest for the holy grail in business, building an RSS feed directly from social networking sites like Twitter to feed directly into a home page on a firm’s website helps. Tweets can be piped directly from Twitter to your home page, which Google recognises as an update, thus enhancing a firm’s rankings in search engines like Google.

There are ways to measure how social networking initiatives impact a business, perhaps the easiest being monitoring website traffic pre- and post-social networking initiative(s). Before investing significant amounts of time in social networking initiatives, do your research. Find the best fit site for your firm and determine how to analyse and measure the return on investment of time and resources.

Leslie Garrett, MMS serves as a senior account manger for Accounting Edge Marketing providing strategic marketing and PR consultation and service in the accounting industry.
www.AccoutingEdgeMarketing.com
Email: lgarrett@AccountingEdgeMarketing.com

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