Ask 5 web marketing experts how they think businesses should use social media, and chances are, you’ll get 5 different answers. Maybe more.
My own view is that any use of social media is valid if it supports the business. There isn’t one correct way to use social media. I’ve seen social media used successfully to do the following…
- Generate leads
- Raise awareness about a new product
- Provide customer service
- Get feedback from clients
- Communicate with customers
- Take the place of custom components on a website
The plain fact is, social media provides two things of use to a business…
- A set of web-based tools that achieve specific tasks
- A built-in community of users
These are both useful to a business, but the second is an irresistable lure to a business that gets in the way of understanding the potential of the media. The existing community is seldom interested in anything the business has to say.
I think the key to making use of social media isn’t to try and exploit the existing community, but to build your own community. That needn’t be orientated toward sales either.
One of my suppliers uses Twitter to post real-time technical updates when things go wrong. This keeps all their customers information, and ensures the technical staff are free to focus on the problem instead wasting time answering the same questions over and over again.
One of my clients uses Blogger as its News page (i.e. press releases and related snippets of news), rather than create a custom component on its website. The built-in features of Blogger are ideal for this purpose. And it has the added SEO benefit of being hosted on an external domain. Over time, the news ‘page’ has gained PageRank and so increases the client’s exposure in Google (who own Blogger).
