Socially Responsible
New Leaders has been expanding our brand to a number of social media sites. Actually, we’ve always maintained these properties, but we’re now focusing on a handful solutions to which we’ll extend our content. What we have come to realize is that free tools – such as a Facebook page or a Twitter feed -deliver far more validated leads than our paid keyword efforts and search engine optimizations do. To add icing on the cake, it is both free and fun to interact with friends and customers using these new mediums. People always talk at conferences about the need to leverage social media in order to drive traffic and create connections with customers. What we don’t hear about is a strategy to pull it off. Here is a helpful process to help you use free social media to promote what you do. Feel free to use whatever products you like, our point is to reach as many people as possible, so you may want to stick to more popular communities that have the most potential connections.
First, you need to consider which services will not only provide the most traffic but also align with your principles. We take design very seriously, which is why we went with a Facebook Page rather than MySpace. Depending on your preference, either or both may suit your needs. You will need to spend a little time working with the tool to make sure it displays your content well, and captures your branding. MySpace is highly customizable, so you may want to consider hiring us to create a Design on Demand. On our page, we syndicated our blog, created a photo album of our work, and added additional pages of content about each of our products. Depending on your line of work, you can select widgets and use the tool that provides examples of what you do.
Once we finished our customization, we provided all of our staff with a single login. Any member of our team could then invite a friend, post a news article, or post a tweet. This allows for a plethora of content to be added to each and every property. By visiting these sites, you begin to get an idea of our tastes and the content we like. It is really fun to see someone you know post a good link or share an idea with the public. Most businesses would consider these tools a distraction; we deem it good marketing and customer support.
Finally, we topped the process off by integrating our website with these service. For instance, The Leader Board posts can now be submitted to Digg, and Flickr hosts some of our our article images. We also created a dedicated page called Social Services that talks about how we use each service, as well as how to connect with it. We then sprinkled our site sidebar with a Social Services component, so people could easily link to these pages.
One thing to remember is to select a number of services you actually plan on keeping up to date. Abandoned and neglected profiles across the web aren’t fun for your customers to connect to. It is important to care for your brand on each platform, and work toward how to leverage the unique benefits of each.
In summary, go out and look at some tools, or start to use the tools to which you already subscribe in a more organized and strategic fashion. You’ll soon find that you can increase your exposure at the cost of nothing and connect with your customers and colleagues in a new way.
Posted on Dec 26, 2008 by Kevin Milden
Post Your Thoughts