You may have read my previous blog post on social media. If you are considering establishing your business’ presence on social media, take a look at a few of these tips to get you started.

Define your goals. What is your purpose in joining social networks? A few of the common social media goals of business are to increase brand awareness, to provide customer support, to educate your audience, to increase sales or to protect your reputation.  Decide what works for you. Clearly define your business’ goals before joining multiple networks.

Find your customers. Once you have your goals established it’s easy to just jump on the bandwagon with many social networks. But first, determine where your customers and prospects are. Which social networks are they participating in? Twitter allows you to use hashtags and keywords to help locate your prospects through its Advanced Search tool.

Develop a plan of action. How will you execute your goals? You may find it helpful to create a schedule for posting. You will also want to consider the frequency of your posts. Don’t overload your followers’ feeds with irrelevant info. However, also be aware to not become silent because you will quickly be forgotten. In developing your plan of action, make the commitment to manage your network(s). A common mistake some businesses make is to join social networks without any goals and then abandon due to lack of resources and time.

Measure your effectiveness. How will you know how your social media efforts are doing? Simple, measure them. You will want to know if your content is resonating with your audience. Also look at various times to post to see when your audience is active.

Want to get social with ShareFile?  Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.