How To Include Social Media In Business

By Dan Shapero, ClikCloud, CRN June 01, 2012

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How to engage your customers on social media is a question many businesses are struggling with. Social media in business can be a great way to get in touch and stay in touch with clients but there's a method to the madness. ClikCloud's founder offers suggestions on how to create a positive, engaging social media presence through Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites.—Jennifer Bosavage, editor

Everyone is trying to incorporate social media in business. Now that Linkedin and Facebook are publicly traded companies, social networking is mainstream. While Twitter is still figuring out how it will make money, IT service providers face unique challenges with social networks. How does an IT service provider use social media to increase business?

There are plenty of activities IT service providers can engage in with social media including blogging, friending, tweeting, posting and linking all types of engaging content in their networks. This can be overwhelming, time consuming and potentially unproductive if you aren’t careful.

Here are some tips on getting the most from your efforts with social media.

Separate the company's social presence from your personal one
Focus on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, Make sure you set up a company page on all of these sites. These “microblogs” are great places to post your content, company updates and fun facts about your business. These networks will push your updates out to the smart phones and tablets of your groups, followers and fans. Additionally, having your blog posts, newsletter feeds and other content from your website back linked in these micro blogs will help you with your search engine optimization (SEO) programs. Some of the networks (e.g. Facebook) require a minimum number of fans before they will grant you your a named fan page (i.e. facebook.com\your_company_name) so don’t delay. Set up those company pages right away.

Integrate social media with your other marketing programs
If you are hosting a “lunch and learn” on fixed priced IT at your office or conducting a webinar on cloud computing make sure you promote the event across your social networks in addition to other promotional activity, such as, email marketing, direct mail and telemarketing. You can set up an event on your Facebook business page, include registration links to your Linkedin groups and tweet out the event links to all of your followers. That will extend your reach to a broader audience and services as another way to stay in front of your suspects and prospects.