What is your social media doing for you ?
You’ve got your Facebook fan page, a twitter account and a blog. You post blog updates, product announcements, and specials to Facebook  and Twitter. You have  links on your emails and website to your social media pages. You have social media covered right ?  No, all you have is yet another method of transmitting information to your existing customers and prospects, you could just as easily send them emails (and it would probably be more effective since tweets, and wall updates tend to get lost in the stream of information on social media sites).  If all you want to is be hip, and you have the resources to do it, this is fine. But, if you want to actually use social media to reach out to new prospects you need to make it viral.

How do you get social media to be viral and grow your business ?
You need to have some percentage of your tweets, and wall posting re-tweeted, recommended, and referenced so people who wouldn’t otherwise see them will. Thats the viral part. So how are you going to do this?  Build a relationship:

1. Don’t just tweet promotional info, nobody watches TV just for the ads (except perhaps the Super Bowl) They watch it for entertainment and information. Add personal, general business, and industry information that may interest your customers and prospects.
2. Get in the conversation. Reply to to comments, tweets/postings, answer questions, do it regularly and frequently (multiple times per day).
3. Manage your reputation, negative information should be responded to immediately. Figure out how to make your critics your fans.
4. Collaborate with others in your industry to extend reach. (Contests, cross promotions, recommendations, etc.)
5. Commit to it. Social media is a long term investment; If you drop it after a short time you won’t get a decent return.

As you can see there is a significant commitment of time and effort to get social media to work. But if your prospects and customers are using social media it can pay off.

Related Posts:

• A couple of great marketing resources
• There’s No Such Thing as Social Media