Get Outta My Head

Hi everyone, I haven’t blogged in a while so here are some random thoughts that I have in my head at the moment.

I have been representing businesses and their Social Media accounts for nearly a year and running my own personal accounts since chat rooms were the new thing.  Running your personal Social Media accounts are easy, running a business account, not as much.  A personal account you can sign in at any time, say your peace, respond if you like and move on.  You can spend 5 minutes or you can spend 14 hours, what ever your free time allows.  With a business, you need to remember that your audience has the same personal freedom and will want to be social on their own schedule.  Just because you checked your Twitter feed before you opened up shop doesn’t mean that the tweets have stopped while your business is open.  You should be checking your feeds often and if your business is being talked about, you should be responding fairly quickly.  We are in a time when responses in minutes are normal and expected.  If you are taking too long, your audience has probably forgotten what they even said to you in the first place.  If you are running your own business and not already used to being on Twitter throughout the day, you may need some help with running your accounts to get the most out of them.  I always want to say to potential clients (even though I can’t), if it were that easy for you to do it yourself, you would have already done so.  And chances are, if I am approaching you it’s because you appear to need our assistance and I truly just want to help.

There are a lot of local businesses out there that are trying to stake their claim in the Social Media world.  I love that this is happening so my advice is, if you are going to get involved, look at the current businesses that are successful in being social.  Take the time to respond to everyone who mentions your business name.  Passing on one person and responding to another will create a sense of favoritism. (It sounds silly but its true)  Make your goal to take care of your followers, not your business. (no one wants to hear on and on about your daily specials)  Stay current with your topics and be a real human being.  Sure it sounds easy but add these commitments with looking for followers, finding interesting topics and establishing a reputation for being “social” on your accounts can take a good chunk of your day.

Ohh, and if just sounds like too much to handle, you always have us that can step in and make it work for you.  It’s what we do.