Social media holds a number of very important benefits for promotional products distributors. It’s a great way to build company and brand awareness, promote your products and services, and engage with customers and prospects. It can boost your search engine ranking and serve as a customer service tool. And it’s free.
Or is it? While many of the sites and tools are available at no cost, you still need to devote time and resources to maintaining your presence in these channels. And as we all know, time is money.
Many companies are like a kid in a candy shop when they first get started with social media. There are so many options — Facebook! Twitter! YouTube! LinkedIn! Flicker! Pinterest! It’s tempting to want to try everything, but doing so will quickly turn into a huge drain on your time, making it not so “free” any more.
That’s why it’s important to start with a social media strategy. Don’t worry — if you’re already active in social media and don’t have one, you can still benefit from creating a strategy now. And if you already have a strategy, it’s important to periodically review it against your goals.
Take these steps to create a simple, straightforward social media strategy:
1. Determine who you want to reach. This may be existing clients, national prospects, local prospects, key industry influencers or more.
2. Figure out where your audience is. If your target audience doesn’t use LinkedIn, for example, it’s probably not efficient to spend your time there.
3. Decide what you want to share. Social media is a great way to showcase your company’s personality and have some fun. People do business with companies they like, so this is important. Just be sure to stay focused on sharing content that your audience will find helpful, informative and engaging.
We’ll have more tips for creating an effective social media strategy in an upcoming issue of the PromoMatters e-newsletter. To subscribe, fill out our online contact form and let us know you’d like to start receiving it.
And we’ll be offering more social media tips here on the PromoMatting blog, including posts on online reputation management, local search, Twitter tips and more. So stay tuned!
Is there a topic you’d like us to cover here on the blog? Please let us know in the comments!
