As we come to the end of February, and our theme of ‘loving your site’, I think it’s time to take a look at social media. While your website is a huge part of your online presence, it is very rarely successful in isolation. There are many components involved in creating a successful online presence (many of which have already been discussed in this blog), and one of these components is of course social media.
With the Pope even coming online with a campaign to popularise Lent via Twitter, it’s easy to see the importance of a smart social strategy to raise brand awareness and increase targeted traffic to your website. But with so many social options, it can be hard to know what to use and how to use it. With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram, Google+ and so on, the choices really are endless. This doesn’t mean that you need to waste hours being on every single social media platform that emerges – for those with limited resources, it can be better to choose a couple of popular options and make sure they are done well.
When looking to choose which social media platforms are best to use, you need to know what your business objectives are and what you want to communicate, and gain, by having a social media presence. But this blog isn’t about helping you choose the right social media platform. There has been plenty written about this already and the majority of businesses would do well by having a presence in 2 or 3 of the major social players – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But just to help you out, here is a great picture that breaks down some of the options.
This blog is about giving your social presence the love and attention it deserves. Too many businesses jump on the social bandwagon, set up their profiles and then promptly abandon them. This may be due to a number of reasons – they didn’t get the results they were hoping for, they didn’t know what to do or they just didn’t find the time. You may see your social profiles as a ‘nice to have’ as opposed to a business necessity, but in reality that can offer an excellent opportunity to connect with your customers on a more personal level and drive traffic to your website. It can also be damaging to your brand to have your website linking to abandoned social pages. It’s very hard to get a positive impression of a company when you are taken to their Facebook page which has 5 ‘likes’ and the last post was 6 months ago.
So if you have been letting your business’ social presence slip, here are a few tips to help you out:
- Create a strategy – what are you trying to achieve with social media and your online presence overall. When you know this, it will be easy to know what to communicate and how.
- Allocate resources – there doesn’t have to just be one person in charge of social. If you have good communication guidelines, it is possible to share the load to ensure it gets done.
- Just do it – many businesses don’t know what to post on the social profiles, so they post nothing at all. But with practice, knowing what to post becomes easier.
- Mix it up – You don’t always need to post about promotions, new products and so on. People are on these sites to be social, so make it personal sometimes. If you’re going away on holiday, or having a team celebration, use that for content. It will help people connect. Try and have a good balance between business / sales messages and more personal type ones that can be interesting. One of our clients have done very well on twitter by sharing bits of fun trivia – they get a number of retweets each time and have seen a great increase in traffic coming to their site from twitter.
So hopefully this helps encourage a few businesses to stop neglecting their social media profiles and jump in there. Obviously you don’t want to make any big social gaffes (hello Qantas, Bonds, McDonalds etc) but as long you’re smart, something is generally better than nothing when it comes to updating your social presence.


