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With every one seemingly jumping on the social media bandwagon and everyone from your niece to your grandma having a Twitter account should your company be getting involved?

The answer to this is a resounding yes! Social networking is a cost effective way of attracting new customers and invaluable tool for brand awareness if not direct response.

However it does come with a few words of caution.

Controls need to be put in place to ensure what the world sees about you is exactly what you want them to see. Not for instance your entire team drunk and behaving badly at a Christmas party.

There are now so many tools, sites and networks out there that knowing where to start and how to approach it is a minefield. With that in mind we’ve briefly outlined 3 things you can do to start getting your company involved today and have highlighted what you should be carful about.

Start a company Twitter account

Twitter is an excellent tool for publishing small snippets of information known as “tweets” to people who subscribe to be your followers. One of the most advantageous aspects to using Twitter is that instead of having to directly contact individuals and push information to them, people subscribe to receive your updates and you allow Twitter to push the information to them in whatever form they want it.

Setting up a Twitter account is very simple and with a small amount of technical knowledge can be integrated into content management tools and existing websites.
In these cases not only does it provide fresh website content that aids SEO but also provides you with one centralised place to carry out updates.

Some ways in which companies are already using Twitter to help them are:
 

• Posting product news and updates
• Posting job vacancies 
• Creating a micro news system
• Posting special offers and discounts
• Engaging with followers by allowing discussions

Caution: with the simplicity of adding new Twitter updates it’s easy to get drawn into posting without thinking about what you are writing. Care should be taken to ensure your messages, although friendly, are free of slang, well written and professional. Remember although Twitter is seen as a fun tool it still represents your company.

Facebook Fan Pages

With its ever growing community, getting your company a presence on Facebook should be high on your list.

Building a company page not only allows you to post information and invite Facebook users to join your community but provides an area for discussions, photos and user reviews. This page can then be seeded and spread throughout the 150million + users by word of mouth creating a free viral advertising campaign.

Like Twitter, Facebook status updates can then provide an easy way to keep members of your community up to date with what’s new at you company.

Caution: Much like Twitter it’s easy to post messages and photos without giving them much thought. There have been numerous cases of people and companies coming unstuck with inappropriate content so always ensure you check and double check any updates

YouTube

YouTube provides a platform to showcase your company’s products, services and expertise in video form.

Short video clips can be uploaded and shared around the community to provide a viral advertising campaign or a reference point to direct customers to when looking for more information.

Sponsoring a channel takes this one step further by creating a branded community to send your customers to.

A good example of this can be found at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/adidasandlondon2012

Caution: When you upload videos to YouTube you invite users to rate and review them. These can be both positive and negative so always ensure you are happy with the content you are uploading and that it represents your company in the best light.

If you'd like to find out more abotu how social networking and social media could help your company give us a call on 0845 0 347 347 or drop us an email at info@punkyduck.com

Although not as popular or indeed populated as other social networking sites, LinkedIn has long been seen as the more "professional" site to be seen on.

Applications on LinkedIn are few and far between and you certainly don’t wake up to find 15 vaguely related people you once added have thrown sheep at you overnight. Application development on LinkedIn is tightly controlled to ensure that only those that will bring real benefit to the user base are approved and made publicly available. Anyone looking to launch an application has first got to convince LinkedIn there is a need for it.

So if it’s so difficult to get an application approved what's in it for the company developing the application?

Well first of all it’s this tight control that makes having your application on LinkedIn quite an accomplishment. Where there are thousands of Facebook applications, at the time of writing this article LinkedIn had just 10. Out of this 10, many are from illustrious names such as LinkedIn itself, Google, WordPress and Amazon.

Then there’s the somewhat unique demographic of the user base.
LinkedIn users have an average age of just 41, older than many other social networking sites but lower than other leading business sites.  In addition to this they are more influential with almost 49% business decision makes:

So if you’re looking to target business users in any shape or form then LinkedIn and in particular LinkedIn Apps are definitely something that should be considered.

To find out more about LinkedIn's demographics, see the full presentation by Erick Schonfeld at Slideshare below.

http://www.slideshare.net/erickschonfeld/linkedin-demographic-data-jun08-presentation

If you'd like to know more about how social media can help you give us a call on 0845 0 347 347 or drop us an email at info@punkyduck.com