Most organisations have woken up to the social media phenomena by now, although there’s still some confusion and debate around which platforms to use, and how to maximise participation and effectiveness of these feeds. Here’s some food for thought for those of you starting out, or considering embarking on a little ‘social media spring cleaning’.

What can social media do for me?
There are plenty of benefits to using social media:
- it can build closer relationships and increase engagement with your customers and stakeholders
- it can help you to gain further insight into what makes your customers tick
- it can get your customers talking to you and to each other
- should you need to give or receive information quickly, you have a receptive communication channel ready to go.

Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? YouTube?
Before starting out, it’s worth considering what the objectives of your platforms are, and who you want to reach. Do you simply want web traffic? Do you want find new customers? Do you want to strengthen existing relationships? Do you want feedback on products / designs / initiatives? Do you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field? How public do you want your communication to be?

It’s worth considering the differences in demographics and use between each of these platforms. Where does your target market hang out when they’re online? How much time will you be devoting to keeping these platforms fresh and engaging? How will you get their attention and once you have it, what are you going to do with it? Primarily – what’s in it for them?

How much fun are you willing to have with social media?
Depending on the product and the messages you want to get out there, you can have a lot of fun with social media. Take this campaign from Orabrush for example. They combined YouTube and an iPhone application to promote their oral health products to a young audience in a cheeky, fun way. This video alone has had over a million views. How much would you have to pay for that many impressions and that level of engagement if it was an advertisement?

Facebook pages vs groups
So you want to use Facebook, but you can’t decide whether to start a Group or a Page. What’s the difference? Fundamentally Groups are all about fostering group discussions around particular topics, while Pages are more about one way conversations, where organisations can broadcast information to their fans in a public manner and in turn, fans can comment or hit the ‘like’ button. Messages sent through Pages will show up in fans’ news feeds, however Groups allow you to start discussion threads, and send messages to members’ inboxes too.

Some things to consider:
- Pages are public, while Groups can be as private as you like
- Members can become easily annoyed by messages in the inbox, while items in a newsfeed can be easily ignored
- Users are far more likely to click on your message if there’s a thumbnail image attached
- if you want people to click the ‘Like’ button, ask them to!

Should I automate my Facebook and Twitter feeds?
These days, tools like Hootsuite, and particular settings on the platforms themselves, allow you to post messages to many of your platforms at once. There’s plenty of debate on whether or not this is a good idea. Sure, the big advantage is that it makes life easier if you can communicate with your followers and fans with one click of a button. But there are some big downsides too.

Firstly, the audiences on each of these platforms may be similar, but the platforms are inherently different. You could send ten tweets out on your feed in an hour and few would bat an eyelid. But flood the newsfeeds of your followers on Facebook and watch the unsubscribe numbers climb.

Secondly, why ask people to join two platforms if they’re getting the same messages on both? Sure, you can send the same message out to both feeds, but that doesn’t mean you can’t shake things up a bit. Both platforms have different tricks to making your messages ‘clickable’. Facebook gives you more characters and an image / video option to play with, so you should use them! Meanwhile, Twitter is text and link based only, so use a link shortener to make the most out of those 140 characters. You should also consider asking an intriguing question or issuing a hard-to-resist call-to-action.

Thirdly, social media is meant to be ‘social’ – automation can really kill that personal feeling if you’re not careful. Talk to your fans and followers, read what they have to say, engage with them, and if you like one of your followers’ tweets, re-tweet it! It’s likely that they will return the favour down the line. Also, get involved in using Twitter hashtags to enter the larger community discussion.

Variety is the spice of (online) life!
Rule number 1 of online – keep it fresh. That means making sure you have the resources devoted to these platforms to ensure new content is going up often, and that your corners of the world wide web don’t become stale.