Use Social Media to Your Business' Advantage

Making your mark in social media can be difficult with millions of new twitter names, blogs, and facebook accounts on the web. This process can be especially difficult for a small business who is already inundated with balancing a budget among other responsibilities. Needless to say, making your presence known is possible!

Patch attended a panel Wednesday with top professionals who specialize in strategic social media planning for businesses organized by the Ad Club of Metropolitan of D.C. The panelist included Gayle Weiswasser (Vice President of Social Media at Discovery Communications), Jack Macleod (Vice President of Business Development at New Media Strategies), and Cary Lawrence (Vice President of Business Development at SocialCode). Here are 5 tips you can use to boost your presence on the web through social media:

• SOCIAL MEDIA GIVES INSIGHT: Use social media to learn more about your customers and what they may want. This technique can help you build loyalty, drive customers to your main website and gain support for initiatives that you are doing in the community.

• CONTESTS EQUALS ENGAGEMENT: This is a great way to create engagement on your website and understand your customer base. For example, you can create a contest with three different sets of criteria to apply and judging by the amount of submissions per category you can develop some conclusions about customer base.

• BALANCE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA: Control the amount of times you post into someone's stream. Don't post just because you didn't post in a while, this can be perceived as intrusive. Make sure that whatever you post into the social media stream that it is in fact worth it. 

• ENGAGE TWITTER USERS FURTHER: If you see a hot topic in the news that people are talking about that pertains to your business, start a conversation. Include their twitter handler in the message box with a note about their opinion, include the link to your website and then ask people to comment back on your website about the issue. (Be sure to have a place for them to comment on the post on your blog, etc.)

• BLOGS STILL PLAY IMPORTANT ROLE: Facebook and Twitter play important roles in engaging people but blogs are relevant. People continue to turn to blogs for curated information in their community.