I recently saw an article about how small businesses should Get Your Employees on the Social Media Bandwagon . There are some great suggestions about how this can help your business and I wanted to chime in with my thoughts that can help market your business in Rock Hill, SC. Ideas that you can use to educate your employees and the payoffs your business can receive.
The beauty of having a team instead of relying on your own effort means that overload can be staved off. And since the search engines love fresh content the more people you have helping you the more content you have out there.
There are a variety of tools that you can use to manage the effort and to jumpstart your team. For the purpose of this exercise I will assume you are already on the “Big 3” and want to better leverage your team (bear in mind these are my “big 3” Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin).
No. 1: Create a company page for Linked In . Large companies have one, why can’t you? With the advent of “following on Linkedin” this can be a powerful resource for small to medium size businesses.
The advantage is that once you create your businesses page, your team is joined together when they say they work at your company. If your team is engaged on Linkedin it becomes a powerful recruiting and lead generation tool.
No. 2: You really can’t write anything about social networking without mentioning Facebook , can you? With the advent of “Groups” and the continuation of pages there are a lot of options for managing and coaching your team. You can also use the new “groups” for a private network, as well.
And of course there is your company Facebook page. This page can function as a mini site on Facebook. A word of caution; be sure to create a page and not a profile. Profiles are for people and pages have some cool analytics that profiles don’t.
No. 3: Simply put more faces your company has on Twitter the better. Just make sure that you are all pulling in the same direction.
Using a product like hootsuite you can exponentially increase the power of the group. Using the pro you can manage your team to make the sum more than the parts. It can make all the team members into, well a team.
The great thing about hootsuite is that you can control a variety of social networks from one dashboard. (I use the pro, I think it is around $5 a month) .
A couple tips as you launch your new wave of awesome.
- There needs to be guidelines enacted, but don’t stifle your team members. You want to use this to give them an outlet to be a person and carry on conversations.
- If something backfires, admit the mistake and correct it. It is a brave new world and your business should be a part of it.
If you need some help feel free to contact 366. Oh, and you can follow us on facebook ,twitter and Linked In too.
