This document discusses how social media is a powerful tool for businesses to build brand awareness, increase sales indirectly, and provide customer support in real time. It recommends using social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube to share promotions, events, news, outages, releases, and support information. Managing multiple social media accounts can be done through Hootsuite, a free tool that allows posting messages simultaneously across networks. Encouraging customers to use social media can help businesses by having more advocates for their brand and content.

1. Social Media is in it’s relative infancy, and proving to be an incredibly powerful tool when used appropriately for building brand awareness, increasing Sales through ‘content’ not ’advertising’ and delivering real time Support and Customer Care. It is about visibility and adding value to your brand not a direct sales channel but can indirectly increase sales incrementally and improve your credibility. Use it for:- Marketing Special Offers/Discounts/Competitions Event visibility Sector news Outage updates Product releases Support information Free customer reviews General company news This type of medium offers consumers an intimate look at your brand - if your strategy is managed by a ‘combination’ of the right people within the business it can bring really positive results. It is more than just a marketing tool and it’s worth sharing the responsibility for the creation of content: Listen to your own people, they often have the best ideas! Marketing – Social Media is LOVED by the Marketers … Sales - Post real time updates of new features, special discounts – links to download centres Technical Support – Deflect known issues or tier 1 type questions with canned responses from your Chat application or knowledgebase Product Development- your Product Managers will have a valuable new insight into what your customers really want Customer Services – Your customers will let you know when something is right or when it’s wrong… you have the opportunity to pick up their issues in real time…so you can fix them in real time. Twitter – this is a tool that offers a catchy headline and encourages followers to visit your site for more meaningful information or you can simply retweet headlines to your followers Facebook - Creating a group on Facebook can also assist with your SEO strategy. The links ’should’ have anchor text (text relevant to the landing page). Posting an article on a Facebook fan page, a blog, particularly one that is indexed in Google Blogs is regarded as being worth far more than 1000 links on directories. LinkedIn - The Social Business network platform is utilised by both companies and individuals who want to be informed and connected with like minded peers. It’s a valuable business platform for raising your own company profile and is used by businesses globally to interact, trade and engage with like minded individuals or companies that can add value in some way. It is popular with high profile recruiters as they benefit from accessing a huge database of potential candidates to proactively market sector targeted roles. You can already aggregate your Twitter account with your LinkedIn feed but it auto updates all Tweets – using Hootsuite allows you to choose where to post. You Tube – Anyone is free to embed videos on their blog or Web page. You don’t even need to be a member of YouTube. Each video page contains the html code that you can copy and paste. So create your own marketing video, embed the link on your website and offer your customers a more in depth product demo or simply more about your business generally. These are all unique platforms but offer you similar marketing opportunities.

2. How to Manage this all in one place! Create a Process Map – begin with your objectives Know your audience Are you delivering a message or having a conversation – how do you position the different types/styles of comms –Across all channels! You don’t need multiple tabs open to manage your disparate social media accounts any longer Influence AND involve your audience – Social is not one way, it’s two Highlight the business functions Social Media can support. Whether it’s improving customer service, developing new markets or increasing brand awareness. Define your overall strategy starting with:- Objectives – Audience-Culture change-Tools and Tactics-Measurement People relate to other people not company spin TOOLS – Start with 2 of the big 4 - Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Youtube 4 Simple Steps People – assess your customers social networking activities along with your competitors Objectives – decide what you want to accomplish in advance Strategy – plan how/why want your relationships with your customer to change Technology – decide which social technologies to use i.e.

3. Which Client Management Tool? There are many apps that enable you to manage your Twitter accounts but to stay organised and benefit from a free app use HootSuite - Integrates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and WordPress BlogYou can simply use HootSuite as a Twitter client or add your other social media platforms as well. At the bottom of HootSuite, just click on the ‘settings’ tab, then ‘social networks’, then ‘add social network’. Fill out your information and you can push your messages to any or all of your accounts. Entering a tweet from within any profile is a easy to do from each of your Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn Wordpress Foursquare and MySpace accounts. Simply enter your tweet, paying attention to the character countdown as you type, and then click the avatar that you want the tweet to be from. A large green checkmark gives you a visual reminder of which social media profile the tweet is coming from. You can send the tweet immediately or schedule it for later. Offers URL shortening (Ow.ly) which is important due to the max 140 character length of a Tweet

4. HootSuite Dashboard Manage messages to your Business Facebook Page/Twitter/LinkedIn simultaneously using Hootsuite via Mobile: Desktop: Mac

5. Commercial Business Benefits Businesses are getting smarter and more informed so saving time managing multiple social media accounts is an important part of your online marketing strategy People use their networks to source products and services when they are recommended by people they know and network with Companies are now networked person-to-person so all businesses should have their own social media strategy and presence online Companies also benefit from communicating with their owns markets peer to peer Gain control over your own Brand by participating in the conversations Generate more direct traffic from your social media outlets Keeps your brand well positioned and consistently noticed It’s FREE Replay offline campaigns online Go and meet/introduce yourself to your future customers and engage with your existing ones Use multiple tools to leverage a combined a wider reaching effect – one page on Facebook isn’t going to create miracles but a combination of Social Media tools gives you more edge and gets you noticed more on separate platforms Consolidate company Twitter accounts to create brand awareness and consistency of messaging Get honest feedback from peers and customers immediately so you can make changes that improve your business quickly Get more new traffic to your site distribute your own links within your campaign tweets (but add value and don’t just try to sell) Get noticed by new businesses and potential customers by linking with the right groups on the different platforms

6. Practical Business Benefits Easily check stats and track results. For example, you can see how influential you were on Twitter in the last day, week, or month. See which of your tweets were popular so you know what type or topic to send out more of and which to avoid. You can also see what influencers have mentioned you so you can continue to build relationships with them. This feature really helps you with the Test – Track – Repeat cycle in your marketing. Get your team involved. If you have multiple people that help you with your social media, you can give them all unique log in information so they can access the account without sharing passwords. You can also assign tasks, such as delegating a certain team member messages you want them to respond to, etc. Schedule your updates. Leaving town for a week? Schedule your updates to go out at certain times and dates to make sure you are maintaining your online presence while you are gone. Or, just get them scheduled so you don’t have to worry about sending out the messages, all you have to worry about is monitoring the responses Easily manage multiple social media accounts. Send out messages to multiple networks at one time and keep track of mentions of your brand or key terms on any of the sites you have integrated with Hootsuite. You can also look at the live feeds from people you are following on Twitter, friends with on Facebook, etc. so you can keep up to date with everything and know when your input could be helpful. Use your Smartphone to manage your account. Not only can you log in straight from your computer, but you can download the app for your Android, iPhone, or other Smartphone and update and manage your Hootsuite from wherever you are, whenever you want to.

7. How do I encourage my customers to use Social Media Tools If your customers are slow to take up social media, your main advocates are not there to support your own social media journey Offer prizes by email via Social Media networks to your customers. Those that already use the tools will connect quickly, those that don’t will be encouraged to get in on the act and win that e.g. iPhone! Explain how to set up and manage an account and the benefits-giving your customers free information and a free iPhone is tempting. I.e. we will be announcing the winner of the draw so subscribe <here> if you don’t have an account and then find us <here< Then check your stats to find out how many quotes/Tweets are then linking to your brand Essential Steps to Social Media Success 1. Follow what your customers are saying 2. Create some custom searches relevant to your industry 3. Share useful content 4. Use a Third Party Twitter Client 5. Respond to any mention of you or your company

8. The relevance of SEO when applied to Social Media platforms Web syndication is being used as a way to syndicate online news content to websites, as part of Search Engine Optimisation techniques. Adding news content lets websites target specific keywords that could cost a fortune in PPC campaigns absolutely free. Syndication benefits both the websites providing information and the websites displaying it. For the receiving site, content syndication is an effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to its pages, making it more attractive to users. For the transmitting site, syndication can drive exposure across numerous online platforms. This generates new traffic for the transmitting site — making syndication a free and easy form of advertising. Done on a daily basis, over time, news content will improve your search engine ranking considerably Syndication via a Blog roll is increasingly popular and if the content is relevant and interesting, users will add your feed more readily.

9. Summary Disseminating your business content across a variety of online channels help ensure you have a wide reaching audience through each of your social media applications. Using one tool to push an instant message to your social networking apps makes sense… think of it in terms of ‘micro blogging’ – it doesn’t have to absorb huge amounts of your time which can be costly – you don’t need to employ someone to do it and your marketing resource is not completely tied up with online networking activities. You are getting exposure and networking with other businesses, opening the business up further to your customer base and gaining credibility online. Connecting with people in a way you could never afford to delivering DM offline campaigns by learning how to utilise Social Media for your business. Provide support and useful information to your customers on FB pages – send links out on Twitter communities Push your blog through RSS for news updates to your customers and keep engaged and up to date Hootsuite was built for groups to manage multiple social network accounts . The social media dashboard is designed to help teams collaborate and deliver information in real time across multiple platforms and applications Make use of the dashboard tool to keep up with all your social media profiles.