No matter how you look at the web these days, it does not take long to stumble across social media examples, usually integrated into businesses large and small.
The way that facebook wants companies to integrate is to create a page for the company, then to start interest groups and forums. In short, the aim is to find which of your users already use facebook, then ask them to join the various interest groups and try to build a community within the groups. In these groups people from your company can provide support and help in appropriate areas.
We have experience with facebook, having created facebook pages for many businesses. Trust someone who has facebook experience to guide you through the finer points of getting setup on facebook.
Ensure that you have social bookmarking links on important pages. It may seem like a minor detail, but imagine if you end up with 100's of backlinks from this. Adding these link buttons does not cost much, and provides relevent and valuable links. Its so easy to perform this step, and infact we usually recommend a service like addthis.com who keep an up-to-date list of social sites.
Again we have experience here, being a delicious user for many years (http://delicious.com/davejcherry) I have personal knowledge of how social bookmarking works. I'm also familiar with digg, reddit and other such sites.
One of the easiest ways to get started in social media is Twitter. Just send short notifications about topics of the day. For example you could send a tweet about a new product or an item that has gone on sale. Again the key is to build from the clients you already have, by telling them you are on twitter.
We are twitter users and really believe in its benefits, and have been for some time. I use Tweetie client on the iPhone and twitters web interface on the Mac.
Setting up a blog has never been easier. There's a wealth of choices and honestly most of them are good. Once you've decided on a domain to blog and topics on which to blog, its purely a case of writing regular content, that's specific to your area and relevent. There are companies that specialise in managing your blog - often for less than you think.
Blogging is a great way of keeping customers interested in your product offerings, and creating a community around your business. Our tech. blog (linked from this site) is really popular with technologies and by technology standards has a lot of readers.
Given the trend that half of all companies have some kind of restriction on such sites, this may seem to be against the grain. But think for a moment, given that over half of your competition may have restrictions, if you generate a comprehensive but safe company policy, you could start a blog and various groups for your company on selected outlets. Once this is done, have some employees join in the groups. In addition you could start a support and customer service forum for example. This will put you way ahead of your competition, who at some point will have to catch up.
Just contact us using the details at the top of the page. We can guide you through the process quickly and effectively. We've helped many people get into social media, and have a few references that you can follow up with. We are cost effective and 100% customer focused.
