Today I will be interviewing Jennifer Smith, our Marketing Specialist here at ShareFile. One of her responsibilities is to help ShareFile build relationships online.

Jennifer, tell me about your role at ShareFile.

I started at ShareFile in August 2010 as an intern, while I was still in school. I loved the company culture from day one. After starting out in sales operations, I received the opportunity to transition to the marketing side of things, which I thoroughly enjoy. I currently manage social media for ShareFile, so if you’ve tweeted @ us or commented on our Facebook page, I probably responded to you. Oh by the way, I’m the only female on a team full of males (feel sorry for me now).

Why is social media so important to ShareFile?

Social media helps us engage with our customers, provide customer support, educate our prospects, and enhance awareness about our brand. Some of our customers really like to communicate via social sites like Twitter and Facebook and we are able to share the latest ShareFile news, product releases and other valuable content to our followers. We are extremely customer centric so social media allows us to build relationships (and be social, which we love) with our followers by engaging in conversation.

What are some of the social media sites ShareFile uses?

Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
YouTube

Do you have different strategies for each of the social media sites?

Yes, we use Twitter to produce real-time valuable content to our followers that is quick to read and easy to engage with. We use Facebook to engage in lengthier conversations, post pictures from events, entertain our fans and let them in on the latest ShareFile happenings. Our LinkedIn profile is linked (ha, no pun intended) to the ShareFile blog and is also used to post job opportunities. Followers are able to share feedback and recommend and share some of our tools with others.

How do you measure a successful post?

We have this super cool tool called Argyle Social, which we use to measure the results. Using Argyle, we are able to pinpoint which posts strategies are most successful for us. We also measure the success of a post by the number of engagements by our followers. We strive to produce meaningful content that our audience wants to engage with.

We have a lot of business customers. Do you have any advice for them to start a social media campaign or improve upon their current social media efforts?

Social media is a huge deal. If your business isn’t currently present on any social site, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. There are more than 800 million active users on Facebook and over 200 million users on Twitter. What to do? Simple, get social. Just because you may not have a business profile on social sites doesn’t mean your brand isn’t being talked about already. When making a purchasing decision, people look to their social networks for advice so you want to be there to respond. You first want to figure out what you want social media to do for your business (enhance brand awareness, build a community, protect brand reputation, etc). When starting a social media campaign (if you’re starting from scratch), my advice is to research your audience and then identify which social platform best suits your business.

You should also take into consideration starting with the social network that you are most familiar with (there are social do’s and don’ts so you want to make sure you are adhering these). Using social media is not just about being on a social platform like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, but actually being social. Use it as a communication device- talk and listen to your audience. The amount of hours dedicated to the social site(s) you chose really depends on your business, but if you’re just starting out, try dedicating even a few minutes per day to being social. Overtime, it may be a good idea to set aside more time per day/week or even schedule your posts through social media dashboards like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, or Argyle Social (my favorite). Once your business has established a presence on a social networking, try expanding onto various other platforms.

Be sure to follow Jennifer on Twitter.