Social media can be a powerful marketing tool that any business, no matter how big or small, should use, but what are your policies governing its use? Perhaps a better place to start is to define and understand why you are using social media in the first place. If it’s for any of the following reasons, you probably shouldn’t be using them:
Because it’s cool.
Your competitors are using facebook, so you feel you must as well.
Marketing people tell me that ‘social’ is good for business.
Being part of a social network is much more than just a marketing gimmick, it’s about raising awareness of your business and giving your business a profile that goes beyond bricks and mortar.
Before you get started on a social media strategy, review your current website. If your site is up-to-date and accurately reflects your brand and organisation then you are good to go. However, there is nothing worse than coming across a link on twitter and being directed to a website that has out of date content or there are no contact details. How can your (potential) customers take you seriously?
So, assuming your website is up-to-date where do you start?
First you need to define your goals e.g. do you want to improve engagement between you and your customers?
You need to determine who is going to manage your social media presence. Is this something that one person can manage or does it require multiple users?
If you have multiple users, do your social media policies cover different roles? Do you have a workflow in place?
You will need to draw up a policy or some guidelines on how to use social media sites. What sort of content will you publish? How quickly will you respond to questions?
How will you measure performance? Can you establish a set of key performance indicators?
Governance
What about your staff, can they use social media while in work?
Do you encourage them to promote the business?
Do you encourage them to speak on behalf of the organisation?
Have you addressed what could go wrong?
This is why you need strong policies and guidelines in place. A lot of this is covered by common sense, but sometimes a little training can go a long way to preventing a PR disaster.
Who?
If your business is big enough to justify its own IT department and also has a marketing / communications team who controls social media use?
If there is any debate about this, let’s just lay it to rest now. It’s not an IT role. Social media use should reside within your communications, marketing, sales or customer service teams. Or perhaps its just you the small business owner. The point is that it’s not an easy task and should not be approached lightly.
How?
Another question that should be answered by policy is how do your staff actually get the content our there? In other words, can I use my own personal phone to send a tweet to the company account? Is this appropriate?
Reputation Management
We have all read about the PR nightmares that have started on twitter or facebook and a social media policy will not guarantee that this wont happen to you, but it does enable you to react to the situation in a professional manner. You will be aware of reputation management and how (especially in a word of mouth business) important this is, but remember that if something goes viral on social media that this can have a positive or a negative impact on your business and you need to be prepared for both scenarios.
Sharing
Social media is all about sharing and there are numerous examples of social media policies in the wild. Here are just a few:
Has your company got a social media policy? Is it managed or policed internally? Do you think that it is restrictive on staff? Let us know in the comments section below.
Twitter has allowed you to create lists of other twitter users for a while now, but not many people seem to use the feature. Read on to find out why you should consider using them.
If you’ve not heard about twitter lists or have not created one, let’s create one first.
To create a new list, follow these instructions:
1. Visit the profile of the first user you would like to add to your list
2. Click the person icon. This brings up a drop-down Actions menu.
3. Select “Add to list”
4. Enter the credentials of your list and choose whether others can see it or whether it is private
5. Check to see if the user you wanted to add was successfully included in that list: to do this, click the person icon and select “Add to list”. A checkmark will be added next to lists in which that user is included (shown below under “Adding or Removing People”).
Note: you don’t need to follow another user to add them to a list; if you want to read a user’s Tweets but not see their messages in your main timeline every day, lists allow you to do that.
The image shows twitter users that I'm not following but whose tweets will appear in my list
You can also follow someone else’s list.
Following a list is as simple as following any other Twitter user. Simply click on the Lists tab when viewing their profile, and select which lists options you want to see. Click the follow button to follow one of their lists.
Similarly, following someone else’s list does not mean you follow all users in that list. Rather, you follow the list itself.
What can you use lists for?
Simply think of them as groups. You can select multiple twitter users and lump them together in a group. So if you follow people who you know participate on another forum or are your friends in the real world you could create a list for ‘anotherforum’ or a list for ‘yourfriends’.
When you login to twitter you then have the choice of reading tweets in your stream i.e. all the tweets from everyone you follow, or read tweets from people who are in your twitter list.
Lists are an effective way of removing the noise from your stream and bringing relevancy to your twitter stream.
A sample of tweets that appear in my list
I’m not getting it, what’s the point?
Lists are only useful for people who follow lots of other twitter users. If you follow less than 100 people you probably do not require lists as you can probably read all the tweet in your twitter stream.
If, like me, you follow more than 100 people, you will find that creating lists allows you to keep on top of the latest news.
With people publishing more than 200 million tweets per day now, you are always going to miss some important stuff. Don’t worry about that – if it’s that important someone else will retweet it or it will turn up in one of your lists.
I follow lots of different people, from different walks of life and who have different interests. This can make me twitter stream very interesting, but it can also make it boring at times! Creating lists around a specific subject matter mean I always have something interesting (to me) to read.
Applications like flipboard allow you to read your lists in much more appealing way outside of the twitter website and can present the content in a magazine style way.
To sum it up…twitter lists make twitter a more valuable resource and enhance your twitter experience.
“We are currently investigating a problem causing many users’ timelines to be delayed.” http://status.twitter.com/
I have to say for me personally this was not the disaster that many are making it out to be. Why? Well Twitter came back up a few hours later and no harm was done. Yet the Guardian has decided to jump on the bandwagon that continually criticises Twitter for these problems. As Bobbie Johnson states:
“Whatever the reasons behind this glitch, it highlights the fact that the service is still amazingly unreliable for something with so much money in the bank.” http://bit.ly/Q4bf8
Just how unreliable is Twitter? For me it works most of the time and as it’s not a critical service I regard it as being reliable enough to use on a daily basis.
So, does twitter need 100% up time to be a successfull business?
Absolutely not. Twitter is a service that allows micro communication to take place. It is not an alternative to email, blogs or any media outlet but rather a tool that allows people or organisations to communicate quickly with their followers.
I also think that Twitter should be given more time before being written off, let’s not forget that it is still a startup exeriencing huge growth.
The question I am is asking is when will Twitter start to make money? When this happens (and only then) we can be critical of any unplanned down time.
As you know, I like twitter and the spontaneous nature that comes with it. I also now have an iphone, which does not support twibble, so what to do?
Fear not, I’ve been twittering away using Twinkle, a location based twitter client, that lets you interact with fellow twinkle users in your location.
This simple app is available free from the App Store and is described by the creators (Tapulous) as a “photo-attaching, location-aware, Twitter-posting, social-networking app”.
This is quite possibly my favourite app on the iPhone and by far the best twitter client for the iPhone.
Twibble has had a pre release announced on twiitter.com/twibble (you can download from here You can follow twibble tweets here twitter.com/twibble It has had a significant make over and should be treated as beta, hence why it is not freely available on the main twibble site.
I’ve upgraded and it looks more impressive and initial impressions are favourable. It is much easier to use and seems less clunky than before.
