Social Media Tips for Success

By Greg Glynn, NMC Account Executive

Keeping up with changes and trends in social media isn’t easy. Sometimes it’s hard to know what deserves your attention and what social media you or your business/organization should be using.

In this article, I want to help clear away some of the social media clutter and share some advice and tips on what I think deserves the most attention.

1. A social media strategy

Using social media without a strategy could be more detrimental than not using social media at all.

Keep in mind that if you don’t know what you are doing or how to use social media correctly it could be a poor reflection on your business or organization. Be sure to create a social media policy, a consistent voice and content plan for you or your team that will be behind your social media efforts.

Look at the most popular social media websites and think about what social media sites your target audience is using. In my mind, Facebook and Google+ are a must.

• Facebook: 955 million users
• YouTube: 4 billion views per day
• Google+: 250 million registered users
• Skype: 250 million monthly connected users
• LinkedIn: 175 million users
• Twitter: 140 million users
• Ebay: 100 million active users
• Instagram: 80 million registered users, 4 billion photos
• Yelp: 78 million users; 30 million reviews
• Flickr: 75 million users
• WordPress: 74 million blogs

2. Measure your results

If you just reached into your desk for a ruler to try and measure your social media results, put it back and instead start by thinking about these better ways to measure your efforts using social media.

I suggest creating a one-page document with your goals and ways you can measure your success.

Integrating social media into your larger business plan is crucial to measuring your success. Creating special deals, bonus content or hashtags (#) are great ways to get feedback about your social media results. Depending on your business or organization, you can adjust them to your situation.

Here are a few examples:

• Did the phone ring more often and are people saying they “saw your post on Facebook”?
• Did traffic to your website increase from the social media websites you are using?
• By sharing your message with the world with social media, did you reach a new market which was previously unaware of your services?

3. The value of SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most powerful elements of social media.

If you’re not familiar with SEO, in basic terms it is the way websites can increase their visibility in search engines (like Google) and appear higher in the search results.  Without getting too technical, it has been proven that having a Web presence on social media websites helps boost your search engine rankings.

4. Should you be gaga for Google+?

My nine-month old daughter’s vocabulary might be wearing off on me, but yes, you should be gaga for Google+. We get a lot of questions about Google+ from our clients, asking if they should be using it —we say yes, and here’s why.

Google is the most popular search engine in the world (by the way, YouTube is number two) and populating Google+ with content is a great way to gain more attention from Google. Since Google+ is integrated with all of Google’s other services, including search, Google Places, and Google Maps it will provide Google with accurate information for people to find your business or organization not only on their computer, but their mobile device.

Knowing the power of Google, it’s safe to say that having a Google+ account with accurate information and consistent content will help SEO (search engine optimization) and Google rankings.

One other great feature is Google Hangouts, a free video conferencing program that allows up to 10 people on one video-conference call. We use hangouts at NMC to meet with clients that are from “away” or save travel time, but still get the pleasure of seeing each other face to face.

In summary, it is extremely important with social media to start with a strategy, so you can aim to accomplish the other items that I’ve mentioned in this article, such as measure results and boost your SEO.

I encourage you to keep up to date with the latest technology; learn to embrace it because your business or organization’s future success depends on it.

You can also find this article on the MarshallPR.com website.