the buzz

Social media is great for finding peers, business partners, investors, customers and employees. It is also a convenient place for these constituencies to engage brands. It’s important to note that jumping into the social media arena isn’t enough to secure the future for your brand—as was recently pointed out on Mashable, “When done right, social media can be a valuable source of customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction.” To reiterate, social media must be done right; but how do businesses “do social media right?” To get the most out of social media, brands have to participate, differentiate and stay active.

Participation is extremely important, it’s not enough to join a venue and have the content come solely from sources such as the corporate blog or Twitter account…a tech-savvy audience can find these on their own. Someone has to actually represent the company and manually post content. If your intended audiences are “friending,” “fanning,” or “liking” your social media avatars and posting social content but your company is not writing anything in response, the brand appears passive, disengaged and disinterested. Content doesn’t have to be daily and it doesn’t always have to be pre-planned, but it has to be frequent enough to show your audience(s) that your brand is aware, involved, and engaging.

Differentiation is as critical as participation. Participating opens the door to audience attention but once you have it, be unique. Jason Fried points out on his Inc.com blog ‘Get Real,’ “One of my favorite phrases in the business world is full-service solutions provider. A quick search on Google finds at least 47,000 companies using that one. That’s full-service generic.” Don’t be generic: show your brand’s personality; learn what makes your brand unique and play to that individuality.

Lastly, stay active. Find your differences, leverage them through regular participation and keep it up! Follow-through is the most crucial aspect of social media for business. The audience is impressed when your company has presence on a social media venue; it develops affinity when you actually write back and have a unique offering; but they will move on if your brand stops being active.

The best way to participate, to be recognizably different and to remain active is to establish a content plan for social media. A content plan will help establish content policies, venues, metadata and a schedule for pre-writing a certain amount of content for the busy times you cannot stay active. smith&jones has expertise in helping small businesses find their points of differentiation, establish themselves in social media venues, develop their content plans, and can even help with writing your social media content. Give us a buzz if you would like to make the most of social media for your brand!