Let’s first take a moment and think about your basic promotion. What is your basic promotion? It is a statement, image, video, or combination of them that talks at a personal level about the company and the products and services. It's like when you seek out people who may enjoy your product and service, and it's like looking for a way to get your business card in someone’s hand and a short, colorful description of your product and service in their mind. It sometimes takes that bit of enthusiasm to push past the denial and encourage new people you encounter to take a look at what you do.
This personal level of promotion may be handled in a technically different way online, but many of the concepts are similar. On both the personal and technical level, we are looking for people to believe in our business enough that they become clients for life.
For most businesses, the place where the “rubber meets the road” online is in social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, your own website blog, Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, and the current wicked step child: Google Plus, among others. We have our company information out there in our business profiles, we have our marketing efforts that drive traffic (otherwise known as people) to our content (our 2 minute speech), we can even set up electronic business cards to return a reminder to contact us if we so choose.
Shaping Your Social Media Engagement
You are ready for the social media traffic, right? Well, now is not the time to sit back and wait for it. Here are just a few ideas to inspire you to go out and make your ideas for social media happen:
Be professional, be promotional, provide resources, but also be personal and encouraging.
Identify your customers in each social media venues and go find them, list them, follow them, sign up for their emails, tweet them, respond to their posts, find a way to talk to them.
Find online conversations that you are interested in and join in, wherever they are.
Share your content, be ready for feedback.
Share your ideas, ask for feedback, join in the conversation.
Remember that your social media followers are not an audience, they are collaborators.
Back up your efforts with in person groups.
Be surprising; engage your responders with small and fun-loving gifts or contests.
Be sincere, be a human and treat people well (honor those who honor you).
Remember, FiG has the creative team that you need to be successful in social media. Contact us today to see how we can benefit your social media channels.