The answer is YES!
I speak regularly and when I get to the social media part and being your own megaphone, I often get blank stares. I find that a lot of people are overwhelmed at the thought of social media.
Here’s the deal though… if you want to stand out in your industry and/or be seen as a thought leader you have to be out there and you have to be sharing your knowledge.
It can be difficult to put your information out there everywhere so I recommend picking one or two social media outlets and do them well. Pick the places where your customers are and concentrate your efforts there. They all have their strengths and weaknesses so pick the ones where you will be able to get a return on your investment of time.
Here is a breakdown of a few of the social media outlets that I prefer and think are beneficial to business owners. Hopefully this helps you narrow it down and concentrate on the one or two outlets that would be best for your business.
My personal Facebook page is a great way to connect with old friends that I grew up with and stay in touch with college friends and old neighbors. My personal page is strictly for people I’m friends with. I don’t conduct business on that page. This is my personal choice. Many people accept any friend request and use their personal page to promote their business as well.
The other option is the company Facebook page. I have one page for each business. That’s where I share business content but not pictures of my kids or what I was up to over the weekend. It’s important to realize however, that just because you have thousands of page likes for your Company page, that doesn’t mean everyone is going to see what you post. Facebook expects you to pay for that by boosting your post. Many people don’t realize this and are constantly trying to grow their Facebook likes when in fact, few of those people likely see your posts.
TIP – using short video on posts is exposing them to more of your fans. If you want more people to see your Facebook posts, consider using video.
People are making a lot of money on Twitter! Twitter is a great place to establish your expertise by sharing your content and the content of others in your industry.
Using hashtags for topic specific items allows people to find you on Twitter. I’ve gotten tons of business and sold tons of books because people find me through things like #prtip. Twitter can seem daunting as it is recommended that you post at least 20 times/day because unlike Facebook, people do not go back in a Twitter feed. It’s real time.
Don’t worry though, there are great resources available like HootSuite, Buffer, and SocialOomph to make posting the 20+ times/per day much easier by scheduling them and allowing you to repeat posts. Remember, it’s real time so reposting identical content is OK. People might have missed it the first time.
Linkedin is probably my favorite social media platform. Linkedin is B2B and full of strictly business people. If you have a product or service that can benefit business owners, you should be on LinkedIn engaging with your connections and participating in groups.
You Tube
Video is king!!! It is so important to be creating video content and YouTube is the best place to house it because YouTube is owned by Google so by uploading videos to YouTube, you are boosting your “Google Juice”.
The internet is not going away so embrace it and use it to your advantage to establish your credibility.
To Your PR Success,
