If your organization is not Tweeting, Facebooking, YouTubing, or LinkedIn-in', then you are really behind the curve! I know you may not want to hear that, but it is true.
The 2008 Presidential Election showed that technology can have a real impact on campaigns, and the 2010 Mid-Term Elections will be no different. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has offered to teach Tweeting to anyone in his party who does not know how.
Businesses throughout the world are quickly clamoring to get Tweeting, get Facebook Fan Pages up and running, get videos on YouTube, and to quite literally, get LinkedIn. If your enterprise is not doing the same, you'd better get caught up quickly. Social media needs to start becoming part of all of your advertising and marketing campaigns.
You may be asking yourself what the value of putting your time into social media really is. Let me tell you right now, I'm not saying to stop paying for web site hosting, throw out your collateral, stop networking in person, and stop making phone calls, but I am saying that if you want to stay viable in your market, social media should be playing a larger and larger part of your advertising and marketing efforts.
With each passing day, more and more people are signing up on Twitter and Facebook and are bookmarking those pages as their home pages and/or using smart phones to check them as regularly as email.
Instead of starting out on a search engine to find your business, more and more often, web users are starting out with your Twitter or Facebook page. If you are not ensuring that anything of importance that you are uploading to your web site is also going onto the social media sites, you may be missing out on an ever-increasing segment of your potential customers.
Stop reaching potential customers and you are going to stop making sales. Sales aren't going to dry up overnight, but they may gradually over time if you don't jump on the social media bandwagon.
How do you get started? Get signed up. Go to http://www.twitter.com/ and http://www.facebook.com/ and start pages for your business. Start tweeting and posting any newsworthy events and start inviting your customers and prospects to follow you or become a fan of your Facebook page.
You will be amazed at how many of your contacts are not only using these sites, but are spending quite a large amount of time on them. If you have any business videos, go to http://www.youtube.com/, get a YouTube channel set up and get your videos posted.
Also, go to http://www.linkedin.com/ and make sure that you have a LinkedIn page set up for both you personally and your business. Customers will have greater confidence in you and your products and services when they see that you are in tune with the growing importance of social media.
It will be difficult to keep up with posting and you will be very tempted to just let it fall by the way side, but create a campaign schedule and set aside time each day to post, read and respond on the major social media sites.
While you may not get a phone call right away that says, "I saw your tweet and now I want to buy something," you will begin to notice that social media is helping to keep the buzz about your business going strong. It keeps your name out in front of customers, showcases your expertise, and adds just the right amount of icing to the cake.
To get a clear view of the value of your efforts, start tracking your results. Record on a daily or weekly basis, the number of followers, number of fans, number of video hits, etc. Record the number of posts that you are making and the number of times people are either re-tweeting, re-posting, or somehow sharing your tweets and posts with others. Be sure that you are using Twitter's hash tags and the other valuable tools the social media sites offer for tracking.
In a March 8 B to B Magazine article, Mitch Wagner stated, "Despite marketers' widespread use of Web analytics, social media remains largely unmeasured by b-to-b companies." This fact gives you a great opportunity to catch up to the herd by beginning your social media efforts, then to quickly move to the front of the pack by tracking your results.
Now, keep in mind, this is a high-level overview. You are going to have to set aside some time to spend visiting the social media sites, signing up, using them, and discovering what works and does not work.
Despite your reservations about spending the time it will take, I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results of how well social media may work for you and your business.
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