5 Tips On How To Use Social Media To Improve Your Business

Looking to really succeed in your business? These days if you’re not on all of the social media sites getting yourself known then you might as well resign yourself to having to lock up the office and handing the keys back to the landlord because all of your competitors are there building a merry band of fans, who unlike the customers you have, are willing to promote you to death without you even having to say a word or send an email.

So what are the key things you need to do to make sure your social media campaign is a success:

1. Make Yourself Useful

One of the best ways to make sure you’re a daily part of someone’s life is to make yourself useful to them, and the best way you can be that is by being focused on what you’re good at and know about.  A great example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk. More commonly known now as the Wine Guy, Gary is not only passionate about wine, but has a huge amount of knowledge about wine because that’s what he lives day in, day out. By utilising this, and not being afraid of giving away advice and information for free, Gary has made sure that he, and his company, Wine Library are right at the top of the list when you’re looking to lean about and buy wine online.

And he’s not afraid to use as many social media sites as he can get his hands on to get his message out. You’ll find him daily not only on his own Wine Library TV site but also updating his Twitter feed and interacting with fans on Facebook.

2. Keep Yourself Focused

As you make a name for yourself as being the expert in an industry it’s important that you stay focused. This doesn’t mean that you can’t tweet about a funny image you’ve found or post a link to a website you found funny on your Facebook wall, but it does mean sticking generally to what you know. Yes, Bob may be gaining huge amount of followers on Twitter and having articles written about him and his knowledge of hammers and screws, but if you’re more versed on vinyl records than tools you’re not going to succeed by suddenly going down an unknown direction. By all means observe the methods that other successful “experts” are using but make sure you stick to what you know about.

3.  Don’t Waste Your Time

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are great for building up your profile, but they’re also pretty good time thieves that’ll have you shaking your head in disbelief you’ve just been tweeting constantly for an hour.  It’s therefore important to make sure you’re making good use of your time. If you find that most people are corresponding with you in the middle of the afternoon then make sure you set time aside to be able to converse with them then instead of feeling you can’t because you wasted an hour earlier getting lost in all the drunken photos people have posted on Facebook from the weekend.

However having said that with social media it’s important to be flexible and update as and when things happen, but if you are considering updating sites regularly you might want to consider using a site like Ping.fm which will allow you to send updates to multiple sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Linked In. This will mean you can keep fans constantly up to date with what you’re doing without you getting dragged into the fun of the sites themselves.

4. Make Yourself Known

Probably the most essential element in getting yourself a strong community is getting yourself known, because even if you know everything about a subject it’s not going to matter one bit if no one know who you are. And the bad news is there’s no quick fix to achieving this. If you really want to be known as the expert in your area then you need to be out there responding to questions, thoughts and ideas on your topic.

And this means hard work.

You’ll need to be setting up searches on search.twitter.com about your subject and becoming part of the conversation that people are having. You’ll also need to be joining Facebook groups and fan pages and participating in these.

Then there’s the blogs. Google Blogsearch is going to need to become a daily stop on your web browsing journey,and you’re going to need you to start commenting on the blogs on your topic. “Yes”, “No” and “I agree” are all out. You need to prove you know what you’re talking about, and that means reading posts and tweets in detail and responding to what is being said so people recognise you know what you’re on about, and aren’t just on an ego trip to get the most followers or most visits to your site.

5. Be Patient

As lovely as it would be for everything to click into place overnight it’s not going to happen. You need to be patient. None of us trust anyone straight away, we all need a bit of time to reassure ourselves this person really is as good as they seem, so it’s important that you hold this in your mind and don’t go proving everyone right in not trusting you straight away by suddenly going off down the spamming route after two weeks because you don’t feel you’re achieving. Stick to the plan and success will come from it.
the book, Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith). It’s not easy. So, even though you may be doing everything “right,” building community does takes time. You will be earning it one person at a time, and it’s important to stay the course (you can read more about this right here: In Praise Of Slow).