Integrating Social Media With Business As Usual

 One of the biggest questions I get from businesses is how they should use social media for their specific business, and what they should post on their social media accounts. There are a lot of answers to that question and endless opportunities to be creative and reach your customers. After all, you essentially own the space. It’s not like a commercial where you have 30 seconds to get your point across, or a newspaper advertisement that is one dimensional.Today I’ll focus on one way you can use social media: as an extension of how you do business. You do this by analyzing everything in your business and see if you can extend it to social media. Here are a few examples of what I mean:Do you offer customers a toll free number to reach customer service? Offer them a Twitter handle to tweet to as well.Do you run ads for open positions in the newspaper? Post the opportunity on your LinkedIn company profile as well.Do you distribute surveys and do research while developing a new product or service? Ask your Facebook fans for their input as well.Do you hang a photo of your employee of the month in the Lobby? Write a feature about them on your blog and a recommendation for them on LinkedIn as well.Do you run coupons in a local coupon circular? Add that coupon as a deal onto FourSquare, Yelp, and Facebook as well.Do you send out a seasonal catalog of all of your products to your customers? Create a Pinterest board of those items as well.Do you collect business cards at conferences and networking events for follow up? Add those people as a contact on LinkedIn as well.If you use social media to amplify what you are already doing, the possibilities are endless. But, if you’re trying to run a social media campaign that is separated from your business operations, you are passing up tons of opportunities to take your business to the next level.Remember: this is one way you can use social media. If you only use your social media accounts like this, it probably won’t be very successful for you. That’s because you will mainly be talking about yourself and not providing any value to your customer.Contrary to what you might read elsewhere, it’s okay to talk about your business! But, just like in real life conversations, if you are only talking about yourself, the other person will eventually get bored and annoyed and walk away. Remember this when using social media: give more than you take, care about your customers more than you care about yourself. That attitude is what will lead to a successful social media marketing campaign.