Listen and share instead?

Every business is unique and different, and so are their social styles. Not everything you see others do will work for your company.

Social activity can’t be ignored, but most small businesses that didn’t grow up in a culture of social online behavior will agree that there isn’t a whole lot of time for chit-chatting in the unknown with whoevers. There’s a business to run.

The superficial benefits to social engagement are obvious:

• Brand recognition
• Industry thought leadership
• Staying current with trends and information

But those reasons aren’t enough to keep you interesting or interested in social activity – they’re kind of flat, aren’t they?

Among the more brow-raising reasons for social engagement, the term ‘social proof’ should have you rethinking social altogether.

Your interaction with others online actually validates your company. You may have a great company in business 20 years, but if you don’t have social media profiles and descriptions for it and don’t talk about it with social media, search engines don’t connect expert knowledge behind your brand with valuable website content. Website pages have to have a way to update with current information and relevant topics frequently, and then be able to share it.

If you’re a beginner to online social engagement, these tips will help you develop a strategy that you can tweak as you progress. Start somewhere. I’m not advocating useless, time-intensive brand-shouting. That won’t help at all.

Use your platform to help others. Find the part of your ‘why’ that brings excellence to the table, and teach others how that benefits them. Give people hope, be a message of goodwill and good information. Be funny, enthusiastic, and genuinely helpful. This is just another way to connect with others, like going to a networking function.

Here are five tips to get you started:

• Decide when you’re going to be available to engage. You don’t have to be in these arenas constantly, but be accountable to yourself and pick 10-15 minutes a couple of times a day. If you’re comfortable with more, fine. Just make sure you can still get work done!
• Use your quarterly marketing plan and current month to pick topics that your company and employees should be talking about anyway and develop your strategy.
• Every platform isn’t important right now, but one location will be better than another. Decide if it’s Facebook (and you DO have to have a business page) or Twitter or LinkedIn or Foursquare that will benefit your company the most. Get comfortable in one area before going on to another. Give yourself a couple of months in your first social setting.
• Think about how often you want to share your topics, and keep it to one of your own topics to three of someone elses topics.
• Don’t just post and leave, try to engage with another person. If it doesn’t happen right away, that’s okay. Being consistent will bring you results. When someone engages with you, respond! That’s what it’s all about.

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Wonder how social media works for your company? If you don’t set up a decent profile, it won’t work for you at all.

The first thing to setting up your profiles is to make sure what you add really benefits your brand. We can talk all day about how to manage the Twitterverse, but when it comes down to it, people join these communities to stay involved with people. They go to profiles first for many reasons.

1. To make sure you’re a real person, to make sure you’re not some ‘bot’ that wastes their time,
2. To make sure you have something they want to hear more about.

Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are three areas where most businesses should have a profile. Each of these areas allows you a small amount of space to share who you are, what you offer, who you work for, and how to get in touch with you to learn more. I suggest you take that one step farther – make sure anyone who is deciding whether or not to follow you knows how you could help them with your products or services.

Your photo is important.
A logo can be helpful as an additional profile (with Twitter you can have more than one), but the reality is that people connect with people, not logos. Upload a professional picture of you that’s friendly, and avoid things that are inconsistent with your brand perception.

If you make money off of humor, then a funny image here might do you good. If you make money being controversial, than an out-of-the-ordinary image might work for you. If you’re the best of the best at what you do, and professional attire is how you dress, then use a professional shot. Let your image do some ‘talking.’

Don’t forget your website address.
A website address is primary. Don’t forget it or your efforts here are futile. All associates and employees of a company should have the company website on their profiles for two reasons.

1. Those links are vital for search relevance. Multiple employees with social media profiles linking to the company website are great for SEO.
2. People legitimately looking for your company should be easily able to do it ,so everything you do to make it easier is a good choice.

Don’t spend a lot of time here pondering whether or not it’s safe to have those links out there because you can’t control how they’re being respected. You can always demand a link be taken down if it doesn’t benefit your company. Another way to handle those links is to stress company pride in your weekly team and management meetings. Make sure employees are aware of how you expect them to behave on social media networks.

Depending on what you do, your domain website link ending in .com or .net may not be the best link. If you want people to go to your newsletter sign-up page or another specific landing page, or even your company profile page, use that extended link where it will let you. (The direct url of that particular page.)

Describe yourself and what you bring to the table.
Your description should be inviting and warm. Let others know your position with the company, and how you enjoy working with people. Tag lines are good here, and so are human-interest keywords (not necessarily the same as search engine keywords). If someone wants to follow a search term, think about the terms you would be found under and use them.

Keep all your contact data available, including your email if you get that option. Some of this information may only be available in extended bios, but people actually read extended bios, so don’t neglect to fill them out.

Add your other social locations.
When you’re working on your branding online, it’s best to put the pieces together for people. Make it easy to see as many of your social media ‘handles’ as they allow. (Daddy had a C.B. radio, Mom and Dad were Powder Puff and the Pipe Machine … I digress …)

You’ll learn the rest as you go, but take your profile seriously. Convey a positive attitude and genuine interests so people want to connect with you. Then, engage in a little conversation whenever you get the chance.

One last note
You can block pornographic and spamming followers. Rule of thumb: if they haven’t gone to the same trouble you have to make sure they have a decent profile, it’s probably best to avoid them. I don’t click on any website links in profiles that don’t have a picture or make reasonable sense.

What’s your ‘handle?’ Share in the comments below! You can reach me @skhamilton, and our team @ZTSM. We’re on Facebook, too. Hop on over there and ‘Like’ our page! (Right now, we’re offering our free report: 5 Keys to Higher Sales in 2012 when you sign up for the Inside Line on Getting More Business.)

Related Posts:

How To Use Twitter For Conferences

Don’t Ignore Interest on Pinterest

We’re kicking off a series today, in response to our clients’ questions about how to effectively use social media for business. If you’re an RSS subscriber, you’ll see this in your feed reader on the day we publish. Email subscribers will receive these tips as part of our weekly newsletter that now comes out on Saturdays.

What is Social Media?

Social media is not just Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or your blog. Rather, it encompasses all of these social channels and many more. I’ve lost count of how many social sites are online, but that doesn’t really matter anyway. We’re going to help you appear to be everywhere, but we’re only going to focus on one thing at a time. 

It all begins with your blog.

Think of your blog as the foundation for all of your online interactions. With interesting, useful content – relevant to your target market, your blog becomes magnetic. Useful information gets shared, which drives new viewers to your blog and new buyers to your site.

The main social media channels we’ll focus on in this series are

• Your Business Blog
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter

If you have particular questions you’d like to see addressed, please let us know in the comments.

Social media forums like Facebook and Twitter offer brilliant free marketing for small businesses when used strategically, but there are a handful of things I’ve begun to hate, I mean…er…strongly dislike when it comes to socializing on those platforms. They are, sadly, things I could have done better or understood more fully if I had made it my entire life for a set period of time. I couldn’t, and can’t, and I’ll assume that you don’t have that kind of time, either. I really do work, and because I write for my living, quiet thought is my friend. That means long hours of intense mulling over and reading (the one thing I love about Twitter, by the way – things I read and learn from what is posted there.)

Please learn from my mistakes. I committed these social media crimes knowing full well what I was doing, and thought in time these problems would rectify themselves. They haven’t. And now I’m paying the price for poor planning.  

I wanted to name this article, 6 Things I HATE About Social Media, but my sister and mentor scolded me and told me I needed to speak more effectively about my calamity, and also that I should share with you problems I could have avoided, rather than just throw the fit I was intending.

I learned social media for business and accidentally realized it was a good hook up for long lost family. That was cool, but I’m not in there constantly typing about my life, and I haven’t talked myself into purchasing the $400 phone that would let me Twitter and Facebook the only time I really would, (out and about with my unique, humorous perspective:-) I should be ashamed, because I endorse social media for my clients and really believe that a local business can use these tools with some really kick-a** results. But for me, I’ve been in it just long enough to know what I hate…er…strongly dislike.

1. I indiscriminately chose people to follow believing it was more important at the beginning to start a list and refine it later.  I thought it was O.K. to start my list with ‘who-evers’ but now I have to go in and fish through them to rid my list of them so I don’t accidentally get rid of someone I like. What a pain.
2. I followed marketers just because we were in the same industry. B-a-a-aad idea. Only a handful are really interesting, the rest just abuse the twittersphere.
3. I allowed strong political perspectives, but prejudice is prejudice, and I hate it. Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative – whatever, why must you decide you’re one thing and someone else is another? I’ll choose for myself, thank you, but political party certainly doesn’t define me and shouldn’t make you angry.
4. I don’t know how to get rid of the disreputable, vulgar and obscene people that for some reason decided to follow me. I report them, they come back. DON’T FOLLOW ME! I get updates in my email every once and awhile when checking my new followers. I look at their profile and see their updates and can’t for the life of me figure why they followed me. Yuck, go away. I’m not a part of any one’s harem.
5. I allowed automated quotes. I should have stopped following those eons ago. Thought it might keep me positive. Some are actually pretty insightful. Know what keeps me positive? REAL conversations and feedback. I’m a positive person, really.
6. I didn’t get that expensive phone so I can’t update when I’m out running errands. Trouble is, I really engage in conversations with people. Real people I can see. I talk to my favorite cashiers, neighbors, people waiting in lines, and just about anyone. If I’m zeroed in on my cell phone during those precious moments, I’m missing out in some rewarding interaction. That phone is a thorn in my side because I know for business, it would help me be more efficient. I don’t think it would help me as a person, though. Sometimes ya gotta make choices.

So, I guess that’s a shameful perspective for someone who thinks all small businesses should be represented on social forums. There’s only a handful of people I really enjoy, the rest I will delete soon, if I haven’t already. How I wish I had been more discriminating. It will easily take hours.

If only local businesses would represent themselves, they could completely tear up their industry giants. Marketers, on the other hand, seriously over-saturate.

Oh, there’s one more thing I strongly dislike...

I love God, and I’ll tell you all about it in person if our conversation ever goes that way. In no way would I ever publicly or otherwise disclaim God, I think that would be stupid because He’s been integrally involved in my life and I’m uber-thankful, but I really strongly dislike what’s happened to marketing-speak. Every time I try to forage new relationships with what I hope to be my peers, I end up with these people I didn’t invite that scream Holier than Holy all over my Facebook page. Nothing wrong with inspiration; I believe God has very definite ways He wants businesses run. But what I’m talking about is over the top. Gonna have to thin that out.

I hope you’ve learned from my mistakes, I’ll try to do better, promise. For those of you who’ve stuck with me through the weird stuff, well…please accept my apology, and…thanks.