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

“entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”
(entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity).–Occam’s razor

Given that I write a blog, I spend  a lot of time reading other blogs, both on general business subjects and on blogging business. Over the past two weeks I read (and commented on) two posts that really got me thinking about social media.  The first post was on the DuctapeMarketing  blog. It was an post about creating a special role or position in a company for the person that handles Social Media (“Adding a Chief Conversation Officer” ); I got into quite a rant on this one. The other article was on Graywolf’s SEOBlog, where he discusses the fact that Social Media is so complex that its not possible for there to be experts on the subject (“Is There Really Such a Thing as a Social Media Expert“). After reading both these postings and ruminating on the subject for a while I came to a realization– Social Media isn’t new, and its mostly hype.

What we call social media on the Internet has existed in some form since the  the beginning of time. Since the invention of printing with movable type, there have been newspapers and letters to the editor; since the 1960’s there has been some form talk radio; since the late 70’s there have  been call in TV shows. Twitter is the Internet equivalent of a cocktail party, where you can get involved in  conversations on different topics with various groups of people. In the late 80’s and early 90’s people wrote books about ‘networking’ at these types of events, there were even (and still probably are ) seminars on how to ‘network’. Facebook, Linkedin, et all, are quite similar to regular social or business luches with friends or colleagues. Before Digg, if you wanted to know what people were reading, you could check out your coffee shop, or hotel lobby, or even a park at lunchtime. The big difference between non-internet versions of ‘being social’ and the new Internet ’social media’ is access and speed.  The concepts and skills manage these activities have not changed much.

Once you get past the hype, and objectively look at social media, you will see that most of the skills you use to be social, will work with social media too. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are technical nuances and issues that you will need specialists to help you with, but the overall strategy and tactics have been around for hundreds of years. Just look at Martin Luther, who nailed a listing of his criticism’s of the Catholic Church to a church door, perhaps he was one of the earliest bloggers. And if you want to know how to drive traffic to your blog, spend some time studying the tactics that Benjamin Franklin used to increase the circulation of his brother’s newspaper.