The arrival of social media has heralded a change in how we view our customers online. Social media platforms now offer the facility to cement your relationship with clients and customers. These applications give businesses an opportunity to lay the groundwork for repeat business. We have found that there is a five step plan any SME can put in place to get their social media strategy right.

1. The time of day you interact with customers is likely to be on a routine or unofficial scheduled basis. When someone buys a newspaper in your shop at the same time every morning, they may also log on to Facebook at the same time each evening. We are creatures of habit and every business must establish when the best time to interact with their customers through social media is.
2. Social media offers a branding platform like no other. It is important for SMEs to brand every aspect of their social media presence. Whether that means using the same corporate colours or ensuring your logo is clearly visible, make your branding an integral part of the overall Social Media strategy.
3. Engaging in conversation is what social media platforms offer us perhaps more than anything else. Businesses must be aware of the difference between talking and selling. Hard selling in a social media environment will not come across well. A general rule of thumb is to adhere to the 80/20 ratio. Spend 80% of your time networking and making connections and spend the remaining 20% selling.
4. It can be tempting to focus on gathering fans and to concentrate on the number of fans that can be attracted. It is far more advantageous to have fewer fans that interact with you and each other than hundreds who joined on a whim and who do not spend any quality time on your profile.
5. And finally, when it comes to newsfeed optimisation, simply because you post something, it does not mean everyone will read it. Make sure your posts are automatically highlighted by Facebook (everybody can customise but if a fan does not customise their newsfeed, Facebook will decide what is highlighted).  The following issues are usually taken into account – how recent the post was made, what your connection is like with your Facebook fans and whether it is a post, video or photo.

Keep these five key issues in mind when executing your social media strategy and make the most of this excellent opportunity to connect seamlessly with your target audience.

Great news for all you folk out there that created a profile page for your business instead of a fan page. You can now migrate your profile to a page. To explain this further, if you are collecting “friends” on your business page it is the incorrect type of page. You need to get people to become a fan or “like” your page. Facebook frowns on people who set up a profile page for a business, another reason you should have a fan page is that the profile is limited to 5000 friends so once you get to 5000 you can go no further.

This new feature will allow you to migrate your profile to a fan page but be aware it will not sync up all content. Your friends will be changed to fans or “likes” and your profile picture will transfer but everything else will be lost so it’s a good idea to download your images etc before changing over.

This is excellent news and long due. For more information click http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate

Do you manage your companies’ social media? Are you finding it hard to find the time to update Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn?  Did you know that the average office worker is interrupted by co-workers, emails or phone calls every 11 minutes and it takes the same time to re-focus? Does this happen to you? 

Millions of people each day use social media to interact with companies, friends and family and by interacting with them you are influencing where they spend their time and money.  Here are some tips to try easy the pain:  

-          Use applications like Tweet Deck and Hootsuite to schedule your posts.  Take an hour a week and schedule the most important posts. You will always know special offers and event details ahead of time, so ensure that you have them scheduled well in advance.

-          Want to cut out the interruptions?  Why not start work 1 hour early, one day a week.  I can already hear you all screaming at the computers as you read this, saying things like, it’s easier said than done, I cannot get up any earlier etc etc,   but I tell you it really helps.  You will get so much more done when there are no interruptions and it may take less time than you thought so maybe you only need to get up 30mins early next week.

-          Make it count – find the right time of day. Analyse when your connections / followers are online.  If they are online at 5pm then ensure that your posts go out at 5pm.  If they go out earlier they will get lost in amongst all the other posts from companies, friends and family.  If you are timing it better and getting better interaction and results you may find that you don’t need to update your pages quite so often.

-          Focus on the social media sites that your existing or potential clients use.  All too often I meet people who are active on all the major social media websites, just because. Why not find out which ones your clients are most active on and focus on these.  Better to use 2 well than 6 badly.

-          Remember to sync your accounts together; this means that your Facebook posts can feed into Twitter. Twitter into LinkedIn etc.  This will reduce the amount of work needed, but be careful to ensure that this works with your strategy. If you are targeting different sectors on different social media sites this will not work as the information needs may be different.

Happy posting

We all have the same problems;  not enough hours in the day to do everything we need to ensure our business thrives and with the birth of social media sites like like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn etc the list of daily tasks just gets longer.

I help businesses every day with the set up and management of their social media strategies,  here are some of my tips to help you along your way into the exctiting world of social media:

• Before launching into using social media, first think about  your strategy. No point in launching into using social media if you have no idea who its targeted at and what you want to achieve. Is it greater brand awareness, do you want to promote specific products, promote an action?
• Which sites are your clients using?  Do not launch into anything until you know if your customers are using these sites. The easiest way is to just ask. Why not send them a survey or next time you are speaking to them ask what they are doing on the Internet and make note of each clients response. This will very quickly allow you to gauge which sites will work best for you.  You can also profile your customers by using The Social Technographics Profile, simply input in your customers age profile, gender and location and this nifty tool will show you whether your clients are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators or Inactive.
• Now that you have decided which social media website to use, the next step is to sync them together. It will depend on which sites you are using but the most popular I come across are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, IGOPeople, YouTube and Flickr.  There are many more and it is normally quite easy to sync them so each time you update one site the update feeds into any others they are synced with it. Every time I update my blog, it feeds into my Facebook page, which updates in Twitter which in turn updates my LinkedIn and IGO People accounts.
• Managing multiple account from one place – use websites like Hootsuite, Ping.fm, TweetDeck to manage multiple accounts and update multiple social media websites from the one platform.  There are many more but these are my favourite. They will certainly save you a lot of time.
• Mobile applications – you should ensure that you are current with your information, nothing worse than seeing posts with old information. If you cannot post from your mobile phone upgrade to a phone that allows you to post while you are on the move,  there are a range of great applications available for all phone types that will enable you manage your social media while on the move.
• Make yourself viral – remember to post things that are of interest to your followers, if they are interested its likely they will pass it onto to their followers and so on. Remember its called “social” media so do not always go in with the hard sell, you should enjoy the interactions as much as your followers do.
• Repeat posting – people are online at different times of the day and may miss your most recent posts, try reposting some (not too many don’t want to look lazy) at different times. Gauge when you get the most interaction from your followers and keep a few minutes aside at this time each day to work on your social media.
• Monitoring – remember to monitor interaction, you don’t want to miss an important comment or question

Happy posting