Social Media Leaps

Listening

Before moving full throttle into the world of social networking and social media, there are a number of things that you can do online to both add value to your business and to become more comfortable with social media.
Knowing what other people are saying about you, your chamber, or your small business is important. Using social media tools is a great way to monitor how people view your brand. It can be used as a reputation management tool or as a way to monitor what your customers think and feel about your brand. How people view you is a direct reflection of the services you provide, and knowing what people say about your brand through social media is a good first step as you begin to build your social media strategy.

Market Intelligence

Keep track of what your competitors are doing.

Do a search to see if they are on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. If so, what type of information are they posting? What are they promoting? What are they telling their members or customers? How often do they update their Web site? Do they have an RSS feed on their Web site so that their members or customers receive frequent updates?

Find out what your members or customers are doing.

Web sites reveal a lot about a company, like what they are focusing on and the direction they are going in the future. You might also be able to find out recent awards or honors they have received that you can use as content for your social media sites.

Decide on Your Brand Name

The brand name you use on your social media sites is obviously something that is very important. It is important to understand that you need to maintain the same brand name on every social media site used. Changing and tweaking your brand name and the screen names you choose for your social media sites can become confusing for your followers. We suggest using the same name across each social media site you use. Unfortunately, there are character limits on some sites like Twitter, so choose a screen name that identifies you, is easily searchable, and maintains the same name/brand across all sites.

Monitoring: Set Up Your Alerts

If you don't do anything else with social media, we suggest you at least set up: Twilert and Google Alerts. They are the two most popular monitoring programs currently being used on the Internet. Although these aren’t the only tools you can use, they are the most commonly used monitoring tools out there. Google Alerts helps monitor your online presence by tracking who, what, and when your brand is mentioned anywhere across the Web. This service will send an alert by e-mailing you whenever new Web pages are published that are relevant to any search term you specify. TweetBeep, which is a similar service to Google Alerts, offers daily and hourly updates sent to you through e-mail, notifying you of the mentioning of you and/or your brand on Twitter. Both of these monitoring tools are great ways to keep tabs on who is saying what about you and your business.