In the third part of a series of blogs covering the information Guy Levine from Return on Digital spoke about at the recent Business Start-up Show in London. By this point he’s already covered getting leads and sales, and using statistics to solve website issues and now he decided it was time to cover what was on everyone’s lips – social media.
Guy’s first point was; “You can’t compare Google with Facebook, they do very different things but people seem to want to group them together. Google users have a function – they want to search, Facebook users want to network and perv at people’s holiday pictures.”
He does have a point, if I think about what I use Facebook for it’s certainly not to find a product or service. Guy continued in his no nonsense way to explain the most effective way to use social media:
- Listen – Find out who the important players are
- Participate – Join in, build respect and earn the right to be involved
- Lead – Ask questions, start conversations and then finally you can start marketing
“Finding out what people are asking and looking for on Twitter can help you make business decisions, Tweetdeck can be a good tool for searching for keywords and keeping an eye on what people are talking about.”
Something businesses often forget to do it to match online and offline messages, Guy said; “There should be signs in shops and offices to ‘like’ things on Facebook and promoting QR codes (which are free to generate) to promote offers and products.”
Another option which isn’t directly related to social media but still a valuable tool is the Google Content Network, Guy said; “This is adding adverts to websites, G-Mail etc. Google lets you track is someone has looked at products on your site and effectively follow them around the internet, it’s run through Google AdWords so you only pay when someone clicks on the ad.”
Social media is a good way to get people to know about your business and improve your reputation online, new advertising options are appearing all the time with the fast pace of the internet and it’s worth keeping up to speed with what’s new.
