Social Networks then. What’s that all about.

Let’s face it, most of us have a love, well, OK, perhaps love is a bit too strong, tolerate – yep, we tolerate social networks, which these days seem to be a hive for spreading false information and outright lies. But you need to be on a variety of social networks and I’ll explain why.

Your clients may be there.

If your client base is entrenched within social media, so should you be. If 10 people visit your site but 1000 follow you on LinkedIn, posting an article on your web site is good, posting it on LinkedIn is great. If you’ve spent the time cultivating a following (and hopefully weeding out the bots) then they clearly are interested in what you have to say, but they may not even be aware you have your own site.

Frictionless

Now imagine someone visits your site and wants to send you a message, sure they could click on a contact-us page, fill out a form, hit submit and hope that the email gets through to you. But if you provide them with a link to their social media account, they’re back in familiar territory and now all they have to do is to send you a private message or tweet and they’re done.

Free Advocacy

Now imagine you’ve written a really cool article, very much like this one. You post it on your own web site and then you post it on Social and someone reads it and reposts or retweets it. Without costing you a penny, someone has become an advocate for your article. Hopefully other people will do the same. All of a sudden you’ve got an army of people sending your article to friends and family, colleagues and clients. You posted it once and the power of social networking took over.

But it’s not all roses in this garden.

There are downsides to social media. Let’s cover off a few of those now.

Extra work.

Posting to your web site can be straightforward, but each network likes to do things slightly different. And you want to be on a bunch of different networks, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Cross-posting to these networks can be a bit fiddly and fiddly means time.

Send/Respond

You need to treat messages on social networks in the same way you would a voicemail left on your business phone line. It might be a trickle one day or a deluge the next. Be prepared to monitor all your messages and respond in a timely fashion.

Bite Your Tongue.

If your views are controversial, it’s possible you will alienate a number of potential clients. Now you may decide you’d rather not do business with X or Y people but if you’re hungry for new business, turning off people is a risky strategy. Sometimes if you’ve got nothing positive to say, say nothing, on the other hand, saying nothing may make people assume you condone it. It’s a tightrope for sure.

So, where did we begin, ah, yes, Social Networks, a necessary evil – there’s good and bad out there. Stay safe kids.