How to improve your social media presence – Article 1

Social media logosLast week, I attended a workshop at Birmingham City Football Club (not representative of my football team – I don’t have one!). Entitled ‘The Secrets of Social Media Success’, I felt I should go along and see if I could pick up any new tips to improve how we use social media both within our own company and for what we offer our clients.

The biggest problem with social media is that it’s still quite new and constantly evolving, and so it’s likely that you’re in one of two camps: you’ve either jumped onto the bandwagon and are using at least some of social media’s features, or you’re aware of social media’s existence but you’re not sure quite where to start or how it can help your business.

In this series of articles, I hope to give an overview of some of the biggest social networks, as well as present some tips to help streamline the process of using social media; making it more manageable, productive and effective for your business – if you’re currently on Facebook, you know just how easy it is to lose an entire evening!

I have chosen to focus on the three main social networks for businesses and business people in the UK – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – and is targeted towards people who have some (if even just very basic) knowledge of one or more of these.

Facebook

As Facebook is by far the largest and most well-known social network, this is where I shall start.

If you currently have a Facebook account, you’ll be familiar with your personal profile, where your Wall provides a place for you and for friends to add comments, links and other media; the Photos section where you can upload your own images or where others’ images of you appear if you’ve been ‘tagged’ in them; and status updates, where you can tell the world ‘What’s on your mind?’. Quite literally.

Fan Pages

Obviously telling the world you’re eating Frosties for breakfast isn’t necessarily what your customers want to know – or what you want to tell them – and this is why Facebook offers Fan Pages. These are separate from your personal profile – and although you do need an account to create a page – fan pages are to be used solely for promoting businesses, brands or products. Other Facebook users are able to ‘Like’ your page, and this then gives them access to statuses, comments, photos etc.

There are 6 different page types which you can create. Once you’ve logged in to your personal account, visit Facebook's page creation page http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php to select the type of page, fill in your details and click ‘Get Started’.

Once the page is online, you need to make it as effective and useful as possible. Upload your company logo as a profile picture, making sure that the image is square (on search results the thumbnail is square so making sure it fits is a must).

Complete all your company details, including an address if you’re location based. Facebook has paired up with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to provide map services, so if a user clicks your address, it’ll jump straight to a map.

Content

With the basics complete, the most important thing is generating new content, keeping it fresh and keeping it frequent. Make a plan with upcoming events and important dates, and then write posts that relate to the event that you can use when the time comes. Try not to bombard your followers with messages all the time, 2 or 3 items a week is enough to keep people interested, but not posting at all will leave your page forgotten.

Content Tips

  • Keep posts short (no more than a few sentences) or people will simply lose interest
  • Use numbers (eg. countdowns – “5 days to go!”) to increase interactivity
  • Include links to feed visitors through to your main website
  • Add photos to help publicise an event or show what’s going on. Images are more likely to get ‘Liked’, and with more and more people using social networks on mobiles – especially smartphones – visitors want content that’s easy to see on a small display, yet memorable– so slightly unusual, quirky pictures will get noticed)
  • Use videos from YouTube and other services – either related interesting videos from other people, or create your own (an article on this will be included in our next e-newsletter), to help emphasise a point or show what you can offer

Interactivity

Facebook is an ideal place to interact and discuss with your customers, and with 30 million users in the UK (and growing!), you can target people from all age ranges...though users should supposedly be 13 to sign up to the service, of course.

Essentially, interactivity is generated through people ‘Liking’ and commenting on your posts, images, status, links and videos or posting their own to your Wall. Asking questions, having Facebook-only competitions and posting statuses like “Only 20 to go till we have 500 fans!” will all encourage users to comment and react to your content.

One way to keep interactions between Facebook and your website is to include ‘Like’ buttons on your website. If people visit your site and have their own Facebook account, clicking ‘Like’ will post what they have liked on their own Wall, expanding your reach. Resources for these can be found here.

Of course, I could go into a lot more detail, but I initially wanted to just cover the basics in this article. If you would like any information about anything more specific, do let us know and we’ll see if we can add something to the blog.

Join us next time for an overview of Twitter. If anything that’s been said has been of interest, or if you’d like help in setting up, planning and implementing a social media campaign, give us a call.

April 21, 2011 at 3:48 pm | Business Thinking, Social Media | 2 comments

Challenge yourself

Do you like challenges? I love them, I enjoy the chance to stretch myself, pushing myself a bit harder. It could be creatively - making a client stand out from the crowd. It could be technically - developing a website that pushes the boundaries of what's possible.

The bike for the big challenge

However, next week it's not a client who's setting me a big challenge, but myself and it's my legs being challenged not my brain. I've always enjoyed cycling, but the last few years I haven't kept up the training, so to get myself back into shape I set myself the big challenge of cycling round the North coast of Scotland. My Dad's joining me (who hasn't let himself get out of shape) and we'll be cycling around 400 miles over some pretty hilly terrain. If you want to give us a bit of extra encouragement you can sponsor us via JustGiving.

So how does Real Point's skill set fit into this? We've set up a blog for the ride which makes use of several social media services. We're also using an iPhone app, Cyclemeter, which allows us to live update our Twitter feed with our progress. We plan to use the iPhone to update all aspects of the blog while we're on the ride - from taking photos and uploading straight to our Flickr feed, updating the blog using the WordPress app, keeping followers up to date with Tweetdeck, which allows us to quickly up date Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

So if you've got a big challenge, why not see if the creativity at the Real Point office can help you? And if you want to know more about effective use of social media on the move, just give us a call.

But most importantly - what big challenge are you going to set yourself?

May 31, 2010 at 9:51 pm | Design, General, Social Media | No comment

Twitter at work

Many people see Twitter and other social media services as time wasters, still unsure of their benefit in the real world. But as Donato, Vankilter and myself can all testify, it works in the real world.

I met Andy, from Vankilter, a little while ago at the Solihull Business Breakfast, but as so often happens never got round to doing anything about seeing him to get the Kilt I wanted.

The other day, Donato, a business friend and avid Twitter user was at his shop and posted a picture of the kilts there. This prompted me to answer saying "I keep meaning to get a kilt", a few messages later and Andy phoned me, resulting in my visit to his shop and a kilt on order (Donato has also posted about this)

So next time someone asks, "why are you wasting your time on Twitter", answer "Because you never know just who might be interested".

February 15, 2010 at 9:30 am | General, Social Media | No comment

The Price of Free – BBC Virtual Revolution

Another interesting episode of BBC's Virtual Revolution, interesting not because I learnt a great deal, but because it shows again how polarised opinion can be. As I enjoyed the ability to engage in debate and comment through twitter as I watched the programme, it demonstrated that some:

  • Are happy to make the trade - free services for my personal information (I happily stake my claim here)
  • Are nervous about who holds the information, and in to whose hands it will fall
  • Are blissfully unaware of just how much information is being collated and how it is being used

It is this last group that perhaps most concern me. As our use of digital services increase, and as everyone, from my parents to the young people at my youth group, search and post online, how educated are we on what this means? For many of us watching Virtual Revolution, we are well aware and as such make informed decisons, but I do think there needs to be some work done to ensure that everyone makes as informed a decision.

As I commented during the programme, "What happens in Vegas, no longer stays in Vegas" but do we all fully realise and appreciate that?

February 13, 2010 at 10:44 pm | General, Social Media | No comment

Business Networks in Coventry, Solihull, Birmingham and surrounding areas

With our web design and social media work you may expect us to live almost entirely in the virtual world, to do all our networking online through social media from Linked In to Twitter. While this is a strong part of our marketing strategy it's certainly not the only one, and is actually made more effective by developing great social networks in the 'real world'.

So you will find myself and other members of the team here getting up at unearthly hours to attend local networking breakfasts or, for those who enjoy the extra hour or two's sleep, going to business lunches and evening talks and nibbles.

As people know that I network widely, I often get asked about what events are available locally. With that in mind I thought it might be useful to put a list together of local networking events. If you know of one I haven't added then do comment and let us know. Big thank you to Becki from Learn2 for supplying details for many of the clubs on this list.

Ones we attend regularly

We are also actively involved with the Federation of Small Businesses who run a wide variety of events at various times accross the region as do the IOD.

Other local clubs

February 11, 2010 at 12:47 pm | General, Social Media | 2 comments

BBC’s Virtual Revolution

Tonight I, along with almost everyone who is driven by the www, tuned into the first episode of the BBC's Virtual Revolution programme, presented by Aleks Krotoski. Not a history of the world wide web as many people expected it to be but a thematic look at how the internet and the www is affecting the world socially.

But the most obvious evidence of the social impact is how quickly the #bbcrevolution tag trended on Twitter. That we now have the means for so many in a world wide arena to comment and interact live as we watch is surely one of the greatest changes that it has facilitated. To me this not just adds, but multiplies the value of watching such a programme. I was able to comment, engage in debate and learn from others knowledge, stopping me from being solely dependant upon the progamme makers version of events.

So if you're not using Twitter already, you're missing out, sign up, download tweetdeck and, instead of just consuming TV, enter the debate.

January 30, 2010 at 10:00 pm | General, Social Media | 5 comments

« Previous Page

Recent Posts

Most visited

Archives

Find Real Point on