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- Write down what you expect form social media
- What’s your audience. Use "personas" if you have them available from other web projects.
- How do you plan to talk to your audience (in comparison to other channel)
- What do you consider as a success?
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- Are you and your organisation ready to communicate on the new channels (Social Media is just a complementary channel)?
- Who are going te be communicating and are they prepared to take enough time to do that?
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- 13 Hot Facebook Marketing Tips From the Top Pros is a mock-up of advices from Social Media experts
- Involver will help you with advices on how to integrate various applications in Facebook
- And you can always rely on All Facebook, unofficial and Facebook pages - official Facebook cookbook.
Twitter is often called Social Network for intellectuals, so it's quite likely you will be able to reach important journalists and decision makers there. You can set up your profile in minutes and in terms of customization adding a logo and a simple background picture resembling your common design should be no brainer:
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- Understand what you are doing. All Social Media applications have their own rules and you have to understand them to use them effectively.
- Invite your work colleagues and technicians to participate in your Social Media channels.
- Make it clear that everyone in the company should be aware of and follow your social media guidelines and policy.
- Answer the questions as soon as possible to maintain you credibility.
- Always make people feel that their opinion matters.
- And most important: If you have nothing to say, don’t say it!
- Use natural language, so you reduce the distance between you and users.
- Don't forget checking the trends all the time. You could be waisting your precious time on Social Media application that are "so last year"!
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- Show people you appreciate their time. They will reward it.
- Facebook users love photos and stories. Add as many photos as possible.
- Create NREN events of Facebook and invite people to participate. That's certainly a new channel to reach them.
- Photograph events and post photos from events on your profile. It will bring the traffic to your site all by itself.
- When you launch a new service use Facebook to share some extras with your users or give them some previews in advance - they will appreciate it. It's also a good way for getting frank feedback.
- Create contests if you would like to activate your users or gain new ones.
- Advertise to friends of your followers. It's very inexpensive and you can target specific users with little effort.
- Monitor what your users like and repeat it multiple times.
- Don't forget to understand, how Facebook works. Information on Facebook is "active" for about 5-7 hours. Use "permalink" optins for content with intended longer lifetime.
- Don't forget twitter can use a lot of your time if you get involved! Try to build it in your every day work-flow but do be conservative!
- Always twitt in #twitter language, otherwise @community will think you #failed. So learn it before twitting!
- Start following journalists and people of the same interest
- Whenever possible try to twitt breaking news
- Be polite, give credit. If you saw an interesting twitt, don'd twitt it as your own. Use Re-twitt!
- Observe when people you would like to reach hang on Twitter. Twitt your news when they are online.
- Use tools to help you manage the twitts. Do you remember the IRC? Twitter is just like IRC but with fancier interface.
- Reply to twits - engage in conversation.
- To promote your twitter @account, event #hashtag or engage users, use twittwals on events. It will help you display event related twitts in real time on television or an extra projector.
- Data on twitter is active around 5-15 minutes. Think carefully when you twitt.
- If you are in the search of new employees, make sure your job billboard on LinkeIn is up to date.
- Engage in conversations in professional groups to let them know you are here.
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