ShareFile has been selected to participate in the Triangle Business Journal’s Social Madness competition. In this competition, more than 100 local contestants are competing in a corporate media challenge that measures the growth of a company’s social presence. Nationwide, there were roughly 4,000 entries across 43 markets for the competition, sponsored by Capital One Spark Business, but the first round of competition is in the individual markets. Businesses compete in three categories, based on size, with the ultimate goal about supporting and nurturing social media excellence.
Interested in some cool ShareFile items? Enter this contest for a chance to win a ShareFile prize pack.
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.
A few months ago, you may have seen our post on social media at ShareFile, but I wanted to share a few tips with you around social media for your business:
Start slow. If you haven’t established your business’ presence within social media, it may be a good idea to start with the platform that you (or whoever will be managing your efforts) are most comfortable with. If you are most comfortable with Facebook (and maybe not so certain about Twitter or Google+ at the time), start your business profile on Facebook. Once you are able to grow your fan base and develop a plan, then expand to other social networks as you see fit.
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.
According to Facebook stats, there are more than 750 million active users- wow! People are spending over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events. Facebook is consuming people’s time. Let’s face it; Facebook is a reoccurring daily activity for a lot of people. Wake up, drink coffee, check Facebook, go to work, check Facebook, take a mid-afternoon break… check Facebook, and of course, you’ve gotta check Facebook at the end of the day for the latest postings.
Does your business have a Facebook page? If you aren’t currently using Facebook for your business, you’re missing out on a large chunk of the pie. There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook and about 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States- talk about global reach! Think about how many pages you are personally a ‘fan’ of on Facebook. Although you might not return to those pages very often, you do get updates on your newsfeed when new postings or status updates are posted from those pages. Bingo. Businesses should take advantage of this opportunity to connect with, engage and educate fans.
I came across and interesting article this morning. A Japanese company called TechFirm [JP] has just released a special Twitter client for the iPad in the App Store. “Breath Bird” lets handicapped users tweet with their breath. Interesting, right? People who can’t use their fingers can still engage in the Twitter universe by simply breathing into the iPad’s mic.
Social Media Examiner, an overwhelming 93% of survey participants indicated that they are currently using social media to market their business. Of the participants, small business owners were more likely to indicate that social media is a key tool in their business. Top social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are an integral part of the marketing process in today’s businesses.
>Managing several social media accounts is time consuming and at times, hard to maintain with other daily tasks. There are several solutions available that allow you to tweet without even being in front of your computer. Tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck (which was recently acquired by Twitter for $40 million), are probably the best known tools used to schedule tweets. You can easily save drafts and schedule tweets from an easy-to-use Web-based dashboard.
