08 Sep Your Business is on Social Media, now what?

In our previous blog post we had written about the top social media platforms out there, that businesses need to get on board with. Carrying on along the same vein of thought, I’d like to bring to attention the point that having your business sign up with all the leading social media platforms is just the first step toward making your organization socially engaged.

Through her article, Jane Hart, Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, is insightful in pointing out that social media built it’s way to where it is from the bottom up, and as such it is a real revolution. It started from a grass roots need for people to be social, to share, to build personal connections with each other online, and grew into a phenomenon that has become an essential tool for businesses to be successful.

Everyday while new and veteran businesses get up to speed with social media, it is remarkable to know that a lot of these businesses do not actually know how to use this valuable tool. They do not know what the next step is, after signing up.

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by my IABCcolleague, Donna Papacosta, owner of Trafalgar Communications, on the topic of “How to market yourself with social content”. Donna had some very useful tips on how independent businesses and corporations can create, use and find content for their social media presence and integrate social content into their marketing strategy. To do this, it is important to make smart use of social media, armed with a proper strategy, while recognizing it for what it is.

At it’s grass root level, when social media had just started off, the content was indeed all about you, but now in its more refined and sophisticated form, content marketing through social media is not all about you, and how you spent your evening. It is about all the useful content out there that will help you get recognized as an expert in your niche, it is about building relationships with influencers in your market, it is about using great content to build communities both online and off, it is about being appropriate in your social activity, it is about timeliness in content dissemination, and it is about knowing how to use the right social media tools relevant to your business.

As Donna says, “Social media without content marketing makes no sense”. There has to be a clearly defined objective, without which your social media engagement is uncreative, un-engaging and un-authentic.

by: Sohini Bhattacharya (Co-Founder & Managing Partner) Allegoro Communications