Now that you’ve done some thinking about what your business goals are for social networking and investigated where your target audience is…
What will be the reaction to your message?
If You’ll Be Joining Existing Communities…
If you’ve decided to use existing communities and social networks to connect with your audience, take care not to put them all off by posting about how great your company/products/services are. You’ll need to approach social networking as a way to help your customers (which will also help you). Start by answering questions and trying to be as helpful as possible. If the community allows you a profile page – fill it out and post blog entries if possible. Once you’ve established a reputation for being helpful, you can make some inquiries of the community (to try to accomplish some of your business goals), be they feedback, reviews, etc (obviously some goals won’t require any inquiries if they’re directed towards increasing sales & traffic).
If You’ll Be Starting Your Own Community…
Starting your own community is the most difficult way to go, but sometimes it is the only way to reach your intended audience. You will need a fairly large time committment to post content (lots of it), market and champion your network. If you can enlist the help of some fairly vocal customers, it will help your cause (in terms of both effort and reputation). Since a large part of the initial content will probably be posted by you, again concentrate on helping your audience. Post frequently asked questions (FAQs) with answers, blogs about what the company is doing, and information to help with your products and services.
Help Your Customers
Hopefully you’ve noticed the common thread: using social networks should be about helping your customers. Helping them should lead to help for you and will give you a reputation for caring and listening when you need to ask them for assistance.
Other Posts in this series:
What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?
Using Social Networks for Business – What Are Your Goals?
Using Social Networks for Business – Where Are You?
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