Technology Marketing in the Digital Age: Using Social Media? Here’s Top Ways to Get Immediate Value for Your Business
Congratulations. You’ve been posting and you’ve even grown a following for your company or yourself. Now what?
Social media is changing the way we communicate and market business, but it’s only as good as what you put into it. That requires a little know-how, especially to take it to the next level where you find it a valuable asset for your business.
Most industries today are using social media for customer and prospect engagement, and many are extremely active. It’s important to understand your customers’ and prospects’ social profiles. Know who is on which platforms and how active they are.
Here are three immediate actionable items that will help you get more value from your social efforts:
1. Use your News Feed on LinkedIn to monitoring intelligence on your customers, prospects, partners and even competitors. Follow all of them. Then make it a habit to read your news every day, as you would a newspaper. When you open your email in the morning, open your LinkedIn account along with it. Spend time reading your own chosen news stream from your community of ‘Followed,’ ‘Liking,’ ‘Commenting’ and ‘Sharing’ on your news stream. This not only acts as a valuable resource to you, it also keeps you top-of-mind with customers.
2. Create custom feeds on Twitter by making custom Lists. Remember those folks above in #1? Gather the same intelligence by, first, creating a customer list of those customers, then monitoring their Twitter feeds. If a post interests you enough to engage, simply retweet, reply or even direct message its originator. Click here https://media.twitter.com/best-practice/create-and-use-twitter-lists for directions on how to create and use the robust List feature in Twitter.
3. Stay top-of-mind with your constituents. How? With your LinkedIn Status Update. More than half of the professionals I know don’t use this powerful feature. Yet it’s an extremely valuable tool. What to post? Start with company or industry press releases, reports, blogs, video links, etc. Add your commentary to those posts to make it personal. And don’t forget that folks like pictures, so posts with graphics or photos get the most engagement!
With a little strategy and thought behind your social activity, you can use social media to “opportunize” your engagement with your customers, prospects and partners. What you put in is commensurate with what you get out of this powerful mode of communication in the 21st century.
[Leadarati helps IT firms drive value and increase opportunities through social, digital and online communications.]
