How to Get Your Company Onboard with Social Business

Many companies from big to small have found success in using social media outlets for everything from online marketing and advertisement campaigns to connecting with peers and employment candidates. Social Business is definitely big business today and properly knowing how to utilize social media outlets such as Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn is important for any business savvy entrepreneur today.

Marketing and Advertisement

Social media marketing can be tricky as the risks of getting negative feedback are greater than ever. Any successful business, however, especially if their product is primarily technical services or technical products, must learn to successfully compete with other similar businesses in this market in order to be successful.

Possibly the easiest entry into the social media network is through context based advertisements. Since social media companies such as Google and Facebook have more information concerning demographics than most other web sites, purchasing context based adverting through these sites could be a good first step to making your presence known in the world of social networking. The way this works is that a business purchases a certain number of advertisements that will be presented to users who fit a certain demographic profile. Google has been particularly successful in this area of marketing.

Demographic based advertising only provides a certain level of visibility with your customers. In order to really take advantage of the social business model for marketing and advertising, one must be an active member of the community. The first step is to create an interesting and catchy profile page in any one of these markets. Whether you are using Google Plus, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, your profile page is the face of your company to the rest of the social network. From there, you can run interesting campaigns that encourage community involvement such as games and competitions or social work. Acting as a subject matter expert and answering questions within the community on certain topics, or posting reference material or presentations help establish your company as an expert resource in a given topic, and can be very positive toward attracting new customers, business partners and employee candidates.

Building Your People Network

The most important aspect of moving your company to a social business model, however, is the use of the tools themselves for connecting with people connected to your company. Many expensive customer relationship management tools have charged high prices in the past for gleaning demographic information from your customers based on expensive databases implemented within your IT department. With social sites like LinkedIn, all of this demographic data is already available to social business customers. With a business account on LinkedIn, you will have the ability to analyze your customer base by key demographic features. This is much more efficient, accurate and cost effective than many customer relationship management system implementations. Targeted marketing and email campaigns become much more accessible and profitable as you can send out relevant material to sub sections of your customer base that will find your distributed content interesting.

Another great use of social networks is the ability to gain direct access into a wide pool of professional candidates that may potentially be great employee candidates for your company. By presenting yourself as a subject matter expert through community discussions and even setting up professional groups could be a great way to get professionals in your line of business to come to you to connect up into your social network. Candidate vetting is also much more efficient in the social network. While many candidates send resumes that may or may not reflect their real world abilities, having access to the candidates social network can go a long way toward ensuring that the candidates you interview are exactly what you are looking for.

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