Could social networking websites help your company reach more people?
The digital world – like the business world – is always changing. New technologies appear all the time and, with them come new and exciting opportunities to communicate with your customers.
In recent weeks, more and more businesses have been looking at the growing number of social networking websites with a keen interest, eager to tap into the huge number of potential customers who visit them every day.
But where do you start? With a seemingly never ending stream of new sites launching all the time, it can be difficult to find the right way for you – and your company – to start transforming ‘friends’ into ‘customers’.
At STORM, we know all the tricks of the trade to get more from these sites and we can give you all the tools you need to engage with an ever-growing audience.
WITH THE PROFESSIONAL IN MIND
The most popular networking site aimed at businesses is LinkedIn. Not only is it a place to find friends old and new, it has been designed with the professional in mind, with plenty of opportunities for those looking to build lasting working relationships too.
There are lists where you can keep an updated profile of your company, making it easy for people looking for your services to find you and you can even maintain a blog telling customers what you’re up to day-to-day.
But it isn’t just somewhere where you can showcase your brand, there are even places for you to post questions and exchange ideas, as well as somewhere to advertise for jobs.
Best of all, it can all be ‘linked in’ with your website, allowing interested users to share information on your site with other users in the LinkedIn community.
The downside? Well, it’s just not as popular as some other places out there. Places where there are more customers than industry rivals...
A JACK OF ALL TRADES
Of course, the most obvious place to head is Facebook – not least because it has become synonymous with the expression ‘social networking’.
Allowing you to run your own profile, incorporate blogs and upload photos, Facebook is a jack of all trades, letting you interface with its ever-growing – last count was 150 MILLION worldwide– database of users.
We can help create a profile that promotes you and your business, develop a friendly, accessible writing style for your blog, even help with photographs and videos. And, of course, you can create your own ‘Groups’ and ‘Fan Pages’.
The problem comes from the way in which Facebook works. It is very passive and, unless your business is already very popular, your presence on Facebook will require extensive advertising elsewhere to bring in more ‘friends’ and potential customers in the process.
However, you can still use Facebook to reach people, and in a much more effective way. Facebook Ads work in a similar way to Google Ad Words, helping your message reach the right people using the site – with your advert appearing as a banner on the Facebook pages of people with a profile that relates to your products or services.
Whether it’s based on location, age, gender or interests, we can tweak your message to ensure it hits the right people, every time. We can even work out an advertising schedule for you, agreeing a daily budget and helping you to keep tabs on what your spending.
But what if you don’t want to go for the hard sell and you’re aiming to improve your profile with your customers? What other options are there?
RELAXED AND FRIENDLY
There are countless other ‘social’ sites kicking around for you to have fun on, but only a few – the bigger names – are really worth using for your business.
Flickr, YouTube and Twitter all allow you to communicate with existing customers in a relaxed and friendly way, whilst also giving you the potential to attract new customers as well.
Twitter is perhaps the most basic – a passive site where people who sign up to be your friend and you can provide them with a 140 character update to keep them posted about what’s going at your company. It’s easy to use, increasingly popular, very direct and it can even be maintained via text message. The downside is that it doesn’t necessarily give you much to work with and you need people to know you’re there in the first place.
Meanwhile, Flickr allows users to upload and share their own photos. Again, this allows you to keep in contact with existing customers but it has the added bonus of acting as your own online photo gallery. We can even embed Flickr into your website, making it look even more dynamic and ‘alive’ and making it much more appealing to all your visitors.
The last option is the infamous YouTube, which takes a step further and allows users to upload and share their own videos.
So, if you have a video message you want to share, we can set-up a profile page for you, which all users will be able to see and interested people can subscribe to. We can even embed the videos you upload to YouTube directly into your website, meaning visitors to your site never have to leave. And of course, we can help you film the video too!
ANOTHER GADGET FOR YOUR TOOLBOX
The only problem of using these sites is there ‘new-ness’. Both for raising profile and for advertising they are still something of an unknown quantity. However, that isn’t to say they’re not worthwhile exploring in a little more detail. Whilst it’s great to be seen at the cutting edge, they should be seen as another gadget in your advertising toolbox – not the be all and end all.
Just give us a call on 01702 719595 or drop us a line at info@storm-media.co.uk to discuss how we can help you reach out to more of your customers.