Business musings

I’ve had a number of conversations with businesses regarding the ‘social media phenomenon’; the general feeling is that they should be on Facebook and the like because it’s the ‘in thing to do’ but really, they’re not sure why!

It’s still all about customers

At the end of the day, it was and always has been about customers. A business can’t survive without them. It needs ways of engaging and connecting with both existing and potential business.

Social media doesn’t change this basic business principle. Social media provides a new communication channel for customer-to-customer and business-to-customer.

Therefore, the same rules still apply…

1. Go where your customers go
All social media sites have ‘contexts’. They generally have a defined purpose; function; knowledge focus; or social context. Understand this and you’ll have your answer to whether you should be involved in any particular social media site for your business.

For example, if a social media site has a primarily American social context but you are in the UK selling to the UK market, then it won’t help you much!

Similarly, if it is a car support site and you sell gardening equipment, then that’s not a good start.

Just do a bit of research and then use your common sense.

Here is a list of over 400 social media sites to get you started. It has some categorisation but you’ll need to do a bit more work to identify those that are appropriate for your company or charity.

2. Appropriate communication
Appropriate communication will depend on many factors. It will depend on your business type; on whether it is business-to-consumer or business-to-business; and on how it is appropriate for you to relate to, and communicate with, your customers.

For example, if you tend to have a more formal business-to-business relationship with your customers, Facebook may be the wrong context; you could come across overly familiar and customers may not wish to share at that personal level with you.

However, if you sell to consumers, Facebook may be just the right communication channel. People represent themselves on Facebook (not their employer as they would in B2B) so if they care about your product or service they may well sign up to be associated with you or any groups you create.

It’s a whole new world

Social media may seem daunting at first, but the first step is to give it a go. Sign up for something and start learning. The more you do this the more natural it will become. Before you know it you’ll feel right at home!

Want to find out the other sites that link to your website? It’s easy when you know how! Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. In the top bar fill in your own website URL [1] (e.g. http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk ).
2. Click on  ’Explore URL’ [2].
3. Yahoo will generate a list of websites [3].
4. Click on ‘Inlinks’ button [4].
5. Choose ‘Except from this domain’ [5] and ‘Entire site’ [6].
6. Voila! You have your list.
7. You can also export as this list as a TSV file [7].
8. If you sign up for a free Yahoo account you’ll also get additional tracking features.

What do I do with the list?

There are various things you can do with this list; it is essentially free market intelligence!

1. By allowing you to understand who is interested in your site, the list can help you to better tailor the content of your site to those people/organisations.
2. You might find that there new opportunities to explore if some of the links surprise you.
3. Use the list to check your market positioning and check that you are described accurately by those linking to you.
4. Do the same check with your competitors, which might provide you with an interesting comparison. If they’re ahead of you online, it may be a way of getting new ideas of how to develop your organisation and website.

Tips kindly provided by Hugo Russell from iCentrum at their Social Media Drivetime event.