Where Do I Begin?

Your business has a website and a blog. Now it’s time to implement a social media strategy, engage social media audiences and complete your online brand. But where should you begin?

Like millions of other people, you have probably used Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or another social media service in a personal capacity. Those experiences may have ended abruptly or they may be an ongoing part of your digital life. Without realizing it, you may have already established a personal “brand” while using these services. Your brand includes your username, avatar, and possibly even custom colors or cover images on your personal homepages within these social media networks.
Using social media as a business owner or as a representative of a business is similar in many ways to how you use these services in a personal capacity. You create and manage accounts with unique usernames, avatars, and other elements of your existing brand. But while you can be spontaneous, creative and carefree with your personal accounts, you need a strategy to make social media successfully work for your business.

Which Social Media Services Should I Use?

At first glance it may seem fun and exciting to create accounts on as many different services as you can find, but it is important to remember that properly maintaining each social media account will require an investment of time and other creative resources. As with any other aspect of your business, it is important to prioritize and maximize these investments by carefully choosing which social media services best fit the needs of your business.

Some services are simply too popular to ignore. Luckily, those services are usually versatile enough to fit any business. Facebook and Twitter are currently the most popular social media services in America, both with hundreds of millions of users worldwide. These services are different in many important ways, but both facilitate the sharing of many types of content, including written updates, pictures, and video. It is advisable that all businesses create and maintain accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

Other popular social media services with more specialized purposes include YouTube (designed specifically for sharing audio and video), Instagram (designed specifically for sharing photos), Pinterest (designed for sharing photos and other multimedia) and Tumblr (designed for light blogging and sharing multimedia). These services may or may not fit within the social media strategy of every business, but for businesses that specialize specific content they can be an excellent source of viewers and followers.

Focusing Your Strategy

If your business or social media strategy is focused on showcasing or producing multimedia content, then signing up for YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts make logical sense. However, if your business or social media strategy do not include producing such content, then establishing accounts on these sites and then abandoning them can be both a waste of time and resources and give the public the impression that your business is struggling or even defunct.

The best course of action is to decide what types of content you want to produce and then investigate which social media services are the best fit for those types of content. Choosing the best services for your business and then focusing specifically on those services will lay a solid foundation for your overall social media strategy.

Focus Your Message to Boost Your Results

Get access to our Brand Worksheet: Your Customer Journey. You’ll find valuable insights when looking closer at your ideal customer and their journey to working with you. Take your insights into creating more focused, clear messaging to attract the right customers.