Social Media 101

As a long time user of Facebook and Twitter I was quite excited today to meet with a company that specializes in social media and how it can impact your business. I thought I was already pretty well versed on the big two but, kind of like my brain, I quickly learned I was only using a small percentage of its potential. We spent time on how to build your facebook business page to appeal to a variety of people. We discussed the many add-on widgets available to create areas to share even more information such as foursquare, twitter feeds and blogs within the tabs of your profile. They recommended that we be active on our facebook page a minimum of 3 times a day. Whether you are uploading some new pictures, changing your status or promoting an upcoming event they insist that inactivity leads to lost followers just as much as excessive activity does. They also mentioned that the prime time for a business to reach their audience is in the morning and in the late afternoon. I think that may be a bit extreme but I plan to try and keep up with their recommendation.

We then moved on to twitter and the speaker keyed in on ways to increase your RTs (Retweets) and your @mentions to help build followers that are the people you wish to target.  They introduced us to http://search.twitter.com/ which allowed us to search our area using a hashtag like #vancouver and the word “photographer” and it will pull up all the tweets that include the word “photographer” and a #vancouver hashtag. Now if you were a photographer looking to network or find people that are looking for one you could go through and follow the people sending out the tweets in the hopes to make a connection. Another useful site they showed us was http://friendorfollow.com/ which allows you to see all the people that you follow but don’t follow you as well as people that follow you that you are not following. Now unless you are a top notch celebrity there is no good reason not follow the people following you provided they are a real person. While we were reviewing these topics he tweeted out that he was “talking social media with the folks @mywork”  and within two minutes he had a couple replies which had @mentions of us. One of which included some nice praise of our company from an industry professional (he has over 800 followers in our market). I promptly Retweeted it with a thank you and with in the next hour I had 11 more followers. Pretty cool watching it happen. It is indeed a powerful tool!

Finally they showed us some of there blogs and explained how the use of blogs incorporated with your websites help move you up the rankings on Google based on content of your blogs and the frequency of which they are posted.This then got me to thinking. Yes I will do it at work soon once the site is set up for it but in the meantime I should get my butt in gear and start blogging myself. Welcome to http://jimmyslims.com. As a novice blogger, all comments are appreciated!