Where do I start with social media?

Posted in Communication

I was recently asked by an uninitiated friend about how best to use social media.  My answer was a resounding “it depends!” followed by one or two pointers that I hope helped him out.

Those pointers may be useful to others as well so here’s what I wrote…

I believe the following things are worth considering when thinking of using social media for marketing:

Start with the end in mind – The end goal should be community.  This means conversation NOT information (although the conversation may be started by information you supply!)  You’re aim is to pull people in not push messages out.

Look before you leap – before embarking on the social media odyssey, you need to think about the resources you have and what’s going to be needed to maintain any social media you use.  Your networks need to be managed and your content needs to be kept fresh and alive, otherwise no one will bother with you! Some questions to consider are available at: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/starting-a-social-media-strategy/

Use the right tools – blogs, podcasts, websites, RSS feeds, facebook, myspace, twitter, friendfeed, digg, stumbleupon, reddit, vimeo, youtube. There are loads of options out there; experiment and choose the ones that work for you and your goals!  Remember not everyone uses the same social networks and you need to find and inhabit the ones where you’ll find potential clients (if they use social media at all)! You may want to consider other useful tools like posterous or Ping.FM that allow you to post to loads of different places at once, which will make life a little easier.

Measure success - you need to keep an eye on whether what you’re doing is worth it!  There are plenty of tools out there to see what’s being said about you and how effective your strategy is: use them. (www.socialmention.com, www.addictomatic.com, Google Alerts, twitter search with RSS, and many more!)

Get offline - social media is not a magic bullet. It’s a set of useful tools to aid conversation, but it needs to be integrated with and support your offline world to really be powerful.

That’s the basics, but before you set off, I would recommend playing with various networks and getting your head round what each of them do.

Have fun and you can find me on Twitter and FriendFeed as @Cogiva, on LinkedIn as Ben Drury and on Google Wave as benjdrury@googlewave.com.