“Social Media” is certainly a BIG BUZZWORD these days so here’s the real question:
“Is there really value in following a Social media plan for your business?”

Simply put: YES.

A comprehensive social media strategy tailored to your business needs is the first step in getting some measure of success.

Benefits to You
So, what can it do if used in a meaningful way? Here are some benefits that are hard to ignore:

Search Results: By extending your presence onto other sites, especially those of high “quality”, and building links from those sites back to your own, you can help elevate your ranking in search results and thus increase exposure for your business.

For instance, if you have a linkedin profile, a Facebook fan page, a business twitter account, and a business Youtube channel with posted relevant videos, you will likely dominate page one of the search engines when someone searches for your company services or name.

Brand Management: As Yelp and other opinion sites gain momentum, you should consider your options for protecting your brand reputation, remembering that advocates as well detractors can comment on your business, whether you choose to participate or not.  By using social media to proactively find and build relationships with customers; you may be able to turn them into fans to help deflect any negative opinions that may arise.  As the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense.  Also, by building more positive sentiment for your brand through social media, you can help ensure that when someone searches for your company, they’re less likely to find any negative comments or that any they find are far outweighed by positive sentiment.

Relationships: Social media offers a unique opportunity to network online and build your business. Even if none of your tweets result in a direct sale, how can sharing, connecting, learning and talking business with fellow interested tweeters not be a benefit somewhere down the line?

What to Do
There are a lot of other benefits to delving into social media but here are our top 5 ways to make it work for you now:

1. Understand it – Creating a working strategy to approach it
Before you can use it, you need to have an understanding of it, unless you enjoy wasting your time. You don’t need to become an expert, but a good understanding will mean you know why you’re doing what you’re doing! This involves looking at your overall business goals - defining them as short term and long term. Once you know what these are, assess the tools as they will best assist you in achieving your defined goals. For instance, Linkedin is a great networking tool for business professionals whereas Myspace is an excellent community for musicians, artists etc. Know what tools make the most sense and then define your strategy as it relates to overall messaging, activity, frequency of activity and then lastly, metrics. You will need to know what you want to measure to determine success as it relates to your goals. For instance, will knowing the number of comments posted to your blogs help you assess success for your goal?

2. Get Digging
Add social bookmarking tools to all of your news and product pages which will allow your visitors to easily bookmark and share your content within their own networks. Sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and reddit are a good starting point. By doing this, you will also, over time, enhance your search results listings since you will have more trusted links coming into your site which is highly favourable to the search engines.

3. YouTube
Youtube now receives more traffic than Google.com. That’s proof enough that user generated content (UGC) is fuelling the new web. Try and think of unique and novel ways in which you can use YouTube to promote your products and services as it relates to your overall goals in your strategy. It could be a clip of your products in action, interviews with your staff ,blog testimonials, or even a full blown promotional video.

4. Twitter
Twitter is a great way of starting and maintaining an ongoing conversation with people you can help and who can help you. It’s basically a site that lets you tell people what you’re doing as well as share useful links and information. Sounds simple but many people don’t get it initially, once you do, you’ll be hooked! The trick is to ensure that all of your microblogging here is always done keeping your end goals in mind as outlined in your strategy document. In other words, does tweeting about what you had for dinner further your businesss goals? Unless you are a celebrity, probably not.

5. Get Networking
Sites such as LinkedIn, Plaxo and Facebook are amazing resources for getting in touch with people, generating leads, raising brand awareness and much more. They’re also becoming powerful business to business (B2B) tools, enabling companies to effortlessly communicate with their stakeholders. You don’t need technical knowledge to use them and they can be great fun too.

You are probably chuckling at this point.
Why?
Because, although we have shared a lot of information with you, you may still not know where to begin. Well, good news is at hand. If you are not the type of person to read a plethora of books on the subject (and there are lots of them out there!) give us a call or send us an email.
You’ll still be chuckling BUT, you’ll also have a great strategy that you can move forward with.