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A presentation given to jewellery designer makers as part of Brilliantly Birmingham 2010 to introduce them to some of the most popular social media tools for business.
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Introduction to Social MediaNovember 2010
• There are a wide range of social media tools available online that enable companies/individuals to engage with their customers on many different levels.
• A company’s online presence has changed in recent years from simply having a brochure website to creating an online personality
• The following slides give you an easy introduction to some of the post popular social media platforms.
Introduction
Many people think of Facebook as a tool for keeping in touch with friends, but
the benefits of having a profile for your business and building networks can be
great.
Before setting up a business page, consider the following pointsReference http://gigaom.com/collaboration/32-ways-to-use-facebook-for-business
• Familiarise yourself with Facebook’s rules for business accounts• Set up a page for your business, separate to your personal profile• Make sure your business profile is complete – list services and contact
details• Keep any personal parts of your profile private through Settings.• Include a company logo or professional photo Limit your business contacts’
access to your personal photos through privacy settings• Consider installing the appropriate applications to integrate feeds from your
blog and other social media accounts into your Facebook profile. Be careful with applications like Twitter that you aren’t overwhelming your contacts with too many updates
Facebook for business
Connect and share • Secure a Facebook vanity URL eg www.facebook.com/rewiredpr so that
people can find you easily. • Add your Facebook URL to your email signature and any other marketing
material (business cards, etc.) so prospects can learn more about you.• Post business updates on your wall. Focus on business activities, such as
“Working with ABC Company on web site redesign.”• Share useful articles and links to presentation and valuable resources that
interest customers and prospects on your wall, to establish credibility.• Combine Facebook with other social media tools like Twitter. For example,
when someone asks question on Twitter, you can respond in detail in a blog post and link to it from Facebook.
Facebook for business
Connect and share • Research prospects before meeting or contacting them.• Upload your contacts from your email client to find more connections.• Use Find Friends for suggestions of other people you may know to
expand your network even further.• Look for mutual contacts on your contacts’ friends lists.• Find experts in your field and invite them as a guest blogger on your
blog or speaker at your event.• Market your products by posting discounts and package deals.• Share survey or research data to gain credibility.• Use Facebook Connect to add social networking features to your web
site.• Suggest Friends to clients and colleagues — by helping them, you
establish trust.• Buy Facebook ads to target your exact audience.
Facebook for business
LinkedIn is often seen as the ‘professional’ social network, and is designed for people to grow their business contacts and keep in touch with current and past colleagues as well as referring people and giving endorsements of their work.
Get the most out of LinkedIn by starting with these three easy steps (taken from http://learn.linkedin.com/new-users)
Own a profile that truly represents you.List your current and past positions & education along with your tenure there. This helps the right people andopportunities find you. Add a profile photo– people never forget a face! Add a summary paragraph. Think of it as your professional elevator pitch.
Ensure your connections represent your “real-world” network.Use webmail import to see, in seconds, all the people you know who are already on LinkedIn. You can then select whoyou wish to invite to join your trusted network. Upload a contacts file from Outlook, Palm, ACT!, or Mac Address View our list of your colleagues and classmates that are already on LinkedIn.
Leverage the power of your LinkedIn network!Post a question on Answers and tap into the experts you’re connected to and the entire LinkedIn network. With professional community of 80+ million, this is the perfect place for those tough questions. Look up someone’s profile before you meet with them. Learn their background and see who you know in common toget off to a fast start. Search for Service Providers and select based on trusted recommendations from people in your network. Anonymousweb searches to find providers are a thing of the past.
• Twitter is a way of communicating in short (140 characters) messages. Updates or ‘tweets’ are quick comments about what is happening right now.
• Launched in 2006, it now has over 175 million users.
• In its early days, Twitter was designed for people to update friends about what was happening in an organic and impulsive way – but as the site has grown in popularity, it has changed into something much more commercial. Companies now use it as a way of communicating their message directly with their audience.
• Comedians such as Stephen Fry and Michael McIntyre use it as a way of commenting on everyday life as well as promoting shows, appearances and merchandise, and businesses can use it as a way to promote their services and interact in an open way with their customer base.
For new users, Twitter can seem like a new language. Here is a glossery ofcommon terms:
• # (Hashtag): A hash symbol is used to comment about a certain topic in a tweet so that people searching for it can easily find it. Searching for #iran will give you all the tweets that contain news about Iran
• Twitterer/Tweeter: Someone who uses Twitter• Tweeple: People who use Twitter• Tweeps: Twitter friends that one is constantly in touch with. Think about
‘Peeps’• Twitterati: A-list Twitter users or Twitter élite. These usually have a big
number of followers and are somewhat famous and influential in Twitter circles.
• Twittosphere: The collective group of people who tweet.• Link: Including a URL in your tweet.
Twitter terms
• Tweet: A post made on Twitter by a user.• ReTweet or RT: Reposting something that has already been posted on
the Twitter stream. RT usually precedes the original poster to give credit. • DM: This is a Direct Message sent to a twitter user. Someone has to follow
you in order to DM them. DMs don’t appear in the public twitter stream but go directly to the receiver’s inbox.
• Via: This can sometimes be used in place of RT. • Follow: If someone’s tweets appear in your stream then you are following
them.• Follower: Someone who is reading your tweets• Unfollow or De-Friend: This is when someone stops reading your tweets.• @ Reply: The @ symbol is used to reply to a twitter user.
Twitter terms
If you have several Twitter accounts or profiles and are struggling to keep on top of
them, you may prefer to schedule tweets use a Twitter client to help maintain multiple
accounts.
There are many Twitter clients but some of the most used arewww.hootsuite.comwww.tweetdeck.com
Twitter tools
• A blog or ‘weblog’ is a type of online diary that can be used to update readers about what is happening in your company as well as communicating your thoughts and ideas on your area of expertise.
• Different to Twitter updates, blog posts can provide a more detailed and comprehensive insight into the authors thoughts. Blogs can publish text, video, hyperlinks, pictures and provide a more in-depth look at the company.
• The main benefits of blogging for a business are:Positioning the company as experts in their fieldImproving rankings on search engines such as Google and BingDriving traffic to a company website by linking to other relevant sites, news stories or postsCommunicating the personality and values of the company and its staff in more open wayEncouraging customer feedback and building an ongoing dialogue
Blogging
The main challenges that businesses can face when they decide to start blogging include:
• Freeing up time to dedicate to regular postings• Being confident in the content they are producing• Maintaining motivation to continue• Responding to any potentially negative comments
How can you overcome these?• Blog about things that interest you and will be of interest to your clients• Post links to interesting and relevant articles• Respond to any negative comments in a calm and considered way – it’s
your opportunity to put your point across. You may prefer to pre-moderate comments.
Blogging
The majority of blog platforms can be set up free of charge, and there are a number of additional add-ons and plug-ins that can be used to integrate other social networks such as Facebook and the photo-sharing site, Flickr . Many companies chose to integrate their blog into their website, so that visitors have a seamless transition between the two. Examples of popular free blogging sites include:
www.posterous.com Posterous is one of the most simple blogging sites available. Posterous offers a free service that allows individuals to create their own web presence by entering a domain name that will make up the web address where readers can find posts by that person- for example http://johnsmithblog.posterous.com. Users post material by either entering text via the site or emailing text content, videos, photos, text files and mp3 files via email to [email protected]. www.blogger.com/Blogger is another blog site that specialise in users updating their blog sites from their mobile phones. They, as with many blog sites, allow users to personalise pages with themed background, fonts, colours and borders meaning that companies can effectively brand their blog sites if they are posting on something other than their own website.
Blogging
www.wordpress.org/WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web
standards, and usability. Word Press works by finding a Web Host and then downloading the software. It
allows you to update blogs easily and is created by a community of people working together to
make its service better. As with all blogs, WordPress allows users to update pictures, text, mp3, video and
upload all these onto posts.
www.tumblr.comTumblr is a more casual version of blog sites but allows for a more complete
customisation of your site including a unique URL and customisation of the sites HTML. This, therefore, gives
more control to users and allows for greater branding of your blog site.
Blogging
