Social Media...where to start?! - Our Experiences.

Recently I have been seeing more and more questions (whether it be through LinkedIn or Event Crowd or any of the social networking sites) about how to utilise these formats for effective marketing. So I thought I'd share my experiences...

Personally I have always had a MySpace and Facebook account, I had a personal Twitter account, but didn't really think everyone would be all that interested in the few sentences I would throw them every now and again. So I slowly drew away from Twitter, and in time MySpace, as Facebook seemed to be the most popular format for the people in my life to keep in touch and be "social". I still never tire of being able to poke people, who I maybe don't particulary want to talk to, yet feel I should still keep in touch with, nothing says a nicer hello than a good ol' fashioned POKE! However, I must remind you this is my personal accounts.

When it comes to our business accounts, it is a different story. I completely understood the need to make the most of these sites and increase our on-line presence but in all fairness did not know where to start. How do you make people like your Facebook page, follow your tweets or find your blog worth reading...?! To try and see through the haze of social networking I attended a crash course on social media. This was invaluable. I'm not going to lie and say I now have over a 1000 people a day checking out our blog, we don't but we do have clear, measurable growth and our online prescence does seem to be increasing.

What the course showed me was the importance of understanding and utilising social media platforms effectively.

• 70% of people online read blogs
• 85% of people online watch video links
• 75% of people online listen to radio links
• 85% of people online who use social media believe that interaction is key

When you think about that, my first obvious question was how do we get them to look at our stuff then?! Content is key... write valuable content people will want to read, create a buzz, ultimatley give people a reason to join your community. That's what I try to see our social media platforms as...the EventDP community :)

So I have stepped up my social media self and given us a complete overhaul. In this I took the most important lesson from my crash course and applied it to every single platform I could...MAKE CONVERSATIONS! In my opinion, social media should be just that, SOCIAL!! So I have been replying left, right and centre to tweets, I have signed up for Google alerts (I love this by the way, a daily email telling us where we've been mentioned across cyberspace!) and I have started my first ever LinkedIn discussion that has had more than 1 reply...we're up to 35 at the moment. What I learnt from this discussion in particular is that people are itching to talk about themselves and their businesses, and giving them a format to do this is not only great for me to increase our online presence but also to find new services we can use in the future. It has increased my LinkedIn profile views from "3 in the last week" to "21 in the last day". I have also seen an increase in our twitter followers, we're averaging 2 new followers a day. Now I know all these figures don't seem particularly high, but if you compare that to the fact that we used to have no new followers daily on twitter and the occasional new like on Facebook, we're doing great.

I think the reason why people give up so quickly on social media is that they expect overnight results. That may have been the case when you first joined facebook and suddenly all your friends are adding you, but when using these platforms for business purposes I think you definelty have to be patient. I was told to expect to see a growth after 3 months or so, we're luckily already growing, however I can certainly see that this is a long term time investment that needs that time and attention to grow. We're growing from it....thanks to social media we have set up three new meeting for the next week, something that keeps us very happy, and very motivated to make the most of what we're doing.

So my advice (if you can call it that) would be to work hard, that valuable content is the key, to not expect to suddenly have followers, likes, reads or connections, but to aim for a steady growth. The biggest thing I can say is to make conversations with people, come across as a person rather than a marketing auto bot and give people a reason to talk to you... if that means starting a conversation then do it! Your online presence can be your best marketing tool as well as your first line of defence.

....And please if you think I'm doing it all wrong, leave a comment, I'd love to hear what you all think.

Enjoy the Sunshine!!