4 Simple Steps to Social Media Success for Business

Why are you here?

Everyone has a purpose. Everyone has a reason for doing what they do, even if they are not aware of it.

For your business success, you must be aware of your purpose and your reasons for undertaking any action.

There are four steps any business should take to ensure they get the most out of their interaction with social media.

1. Establish Goals

What do you desire to achieve by introducing your business to twitter, linkedin or facebook? Ideally, it should be along the lines of creating awareness of your brand, generating leads, conversing with existing customers.

If you want to sell online, join eBay or start an online shop, social networkers aren’t interested.

The goals and objective you set for your business when you started out should help refine what you want to achieve on social networks, but bear in mind that cold-selling is frowned upon. So your focus should be interacting, promoting, and sharing.

2. Listen

“Listen and act”. That is the best thing I was ever told. It holds even more relevance in social networks today.

Being able to know who your audience are, where they are, what they do and don’t like, how they interact and what mediums they interact on, is the highest form of listening in business, not just on social networks. The same reason why you may conduct market research is the same reason why you listen on social networks. Without listening you cannot promote your service in a way that is relevant to your target audience.

Listening allows you to define your relevance to a market, the only things that are discuss on any social network are things of relevance; VAT rise, football results, Eastenders...you need to be listening to the conversations at all times.

3. Build

It is at this point that you prepare your weapons for war! “Hoo-ah!” Ok, a little excited. This step is undertaken once you have the information you need about your audience. This is where you begin to design your social media presence. You need to have a base of operations outside of twitter, whether that be a website or a blog, you need something to send your followers to when you do promote. You also need something that allows your followers to advocate on your behalf. So adding Tweet this and Like buttons to your blogs and websites are also important in this stage.

Build up your profile in small steps, there is no big instant social media success story; everyone starts from the bottom and works their way up.

4. Engage/Participate

If you have done everything you should have done by this point, you are now ready to engage your audience, this includes following new tweeters, engaging with them and participating in conversations, i.e hashtag conversations.

When you engage with your followers, think of it as a date, you try to entertain them, converse with them over a variety of topics and they will decide whether they want to take it further. However, if your conversation in that date is “I” and “me”, well I’m sure we all have experience of what happens in that case. “Worst date ever! So self-obsessed!” and given the word of mouth element attached to twitter and social networks this will not bode well for your and your businesses reputation. So converse freely about industry issues, current affairs, sport add a little banter – be human.

Just one last thing BUY A SMARTPHONE or if you have one, use it to tweet! I hate being followed by businesses whose last tweet was a link 20hours ago. Mobile is what you need to be, mobile is how you should be operating. What if your laptop or PC breaks down? You're not going to go to the library to tweet are you? Mobile devices are a blessing for businesses and if you are serious about following step 4 you need to at least have instant access to your social network platforms.