Starting Out with Social Media

A Blog

Nearly everyone I meet wants to include social media in their marketing. I believe that the best way to start your social media programme is to create a blog so here goes!

"No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog." Chris Brogan, CEO of Human Business Works.

This quote was shared with me by a marketing colleague and helped me to decide to start my blog. There is loads of free information available on subjects that you should write about. As with all other areas of marketing activity its all about who you are trying to reach.

For me its important that I can endorse my skills so I can help my clients to implement their social media activity. I found that its relatively straightforward to set up a blog using free tools, to create a page on your website and link the blog to publish it. A blog is a great way to communicate further on other social media such as LinkedIn too.

LinkedIn

I use LinkedIn a lot as its so widely used and recognised in the business community. It has helped me to stay on people's radars and to communicate with people I have either lost touch with or to contact. To speed up my knowledge of LinkedIn I decided to go on a training course which I found was a good way to learn and apply the knowledge learnt )I'd be happy to recommend the company). Since then I have successfully updated my personal profile, created a Marketing Matters company page and now understand what LinkedIn has to offer.

Some of my clients also use LinkedIn to help generate new business and leads too often by using InMails. I have also noticed that companies ask their employees to update their personal profiles with company information and to include relevant company or product key words to help them be found in searches.

I can understand that this may disgruntle employees a little as it does seem to be treading in their personal space but it really doesn't do any harm, will promote your company and really help the marketing people out!

Its also a good idea to "Follow" companies that you are interested in.

Website

Lastly I've also been updating my website, Marketing Matters. Its imperative that companies continually think about using their websites as content marketing tools. There are so many things you can do to improve the availability of information and keep your sites updated.

Thanks for reading this and hope to hear from you soon!