Enhancing your business profile using Social Media – It is free – It is easy – So how do I do it?

Social Media Integration

Everyone and every company now has a Facebook page, or a Twitter account that you can follow and there is no reason why you cannot follow the same path.  This is an easy way to communicate to your customers via a medium that is free and will allow you to publish photographs, links and information in a quick and effective way.

Creating a Facebook Business Profile is very easy, and there are lots of guides on the Facebook site itself in giving you step by step details on how to do this but you must remember a few golden rules when creating your site as Remember this is your business image you are portraying.

• Create a business profile for your customers  to interact with you on Facebook and to keep existing friends and contacts up to date on what your business is doing.
• If you’d feel comfortable sending someone a personal email, you probably know them well enough to connect with them on Facebook.
• Your profile should make you look interesting. If people are drawn to you as a person, they’ll want to find out more about you as a business. It’s about building rapport.
• Think of your profile as a cv for your personality.
• Fill out interests and hobbies only if they are genuinely interesting – stick to the unusual and unique. ‘Travel’ and ‘sports’ instantly sound dull, but ‘mountain climbing’ and ‘ice-skating’ are a talking point.
• Put in music and TV if you like – but lay off shouting about any death metal bands. Remember you are still being viewed by potential customers.
• Choose a smiling, relaxed picture of yourself – not drunk or cheesy. Keep the image consistent across other social media platforms if you use them.
• Introduce your business by writing about it in your profile.
• Keep the description brief.
• Always include links to your website.
• Give insight into why you’re passionate about it.
• Use what you say to subtly deliver brand messages.
• Post interesting content regularly: industry-relevant articles, photos (remember to keep your professional reputation in mind though) and status updates keep your page fresh and keep you in people’s minds.

Tweet and be heard

Twitter is also a great way to keep people up-to-date with what you are doing, and about sharing information with your customers.  Twitter has its own page for best business practices with lots of other good ideas on how to use your mobile devices in order to post on on the move, and below is small extract from that page on how to build your following, reputation, and customer’s trust with these simple practices:

• Share. Share photos and behind the scenes info about your business. Even better, give a glimpse of developing projects and events. Users come to Twitter to get and share the latest, so give it to them!
• Listen. Regularly monitor the comments about your company, brand, and products.
• Ask. Ask questions of your followers to glean valuable insights and show that you are listening.
• Respond. Respond to compliments and feedback in real time
• Reward. Tweet updates about special offers, discounts and time-sensitive deals.
• Demonstrate wider leadership and know-how. Reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business.
• Champion your stakeholders. Retweet and reply publicly to great tweets posted by your followers and customers.
• Establish the right voice. Twitter users tend to prefer a direct, genuine, and of course, a likable tone from your business, but think about your voice as you Tweet. How do you want your business to appear to the Twitter community?