You can think of social media as a set of tools that your business center can use for a variety of purposes – customer service, branding, promotion, relationship management, etc. Just as with any toolkit, you’re not going to use every tool every time.

Sometimes the hammer fits, but if you’re trying to measure something the hammer is pretty much useless. Similarly, sometimes a blog will fit perfectly, while other times YouTube might be a more suitable tool.

The barrier for getting started with social media is low; it’s dependent on your involvement level, objectives, and goals. Thefacilitators of the message, our tools, are the key components that make it all work. The sole purpose of these tools is to: create, manage and distribute content, build awareness, drive traffic, connect with our customers and hopefully turn a lead into a prospective sale.

If social media represents a set of tools – what should be in your office business center’s toolkit?

Social Media Statistics

The default tool in any toolbox always starts with Analytics. Knowing where your executive suite company’s existing traffic or lack of traffic it is coming from will yield a goldmine of data that can be strategically utilized.

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher converting websites.

Build your blog community with RSS
Give your readership ways to stay up-to-date and informed with your blog, by encouraging them to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. FeedBurner, another Google-owned product, is the only game in town for feed management. It will give you statistical data about your feeds content, distribution, and subscribers. Even though the data can be taken with a grain of salt. The real benefit of Feedburner is the ability to offer email and RSS reader subscriptions to readers of your blog. The trend, I find, is shifting more to email subscriptions than RSS subscriptions. Feedburner’s email delivery service works very well and it can be customized rather nicely. If we can’t educate consumers on using RSS readers, we can at least educate them to subscribe via email, something everyone has done at some point.

Social Networking and Social Signage

Professional Networking
LinkedIn is the tool of choice for professional networking. At the very least, if you’re not using the site for employment purposes, fill out a completed work history, resume, and profile. Set your profile to public so that it ranks for your name. LinkedIn allows you to aggregate third party service content such as, blogs and SlideShare presentations into your profile page. Use your profile to showcase your work and talent. Create a group page for your business center and keep in touch with current clients and prospects that way.

Social Networking
Facebook: love it or hate it, it’s here, and it’s the 800-pound guerrilla force to be reckoned with. Use Facebook for professional or personal networking. Be cautious on how you combine the two, because they can very easily spill over onto each other. If you’re going to be doing any marketing on Facebook, set up a public fan page. Facebook is a completely different beast and should be treated as such. There are a ton of bells and whistles that will allow you to customize your Facebook page, in addition to aggregating content from other third party sources.

Social Megaphone
Twitter is a social megaphone. There is no right or wrong way to use Twitter, however due to 140 char limitations it’s best for megaphoning links and information back to your home base. Establishing a Twitter presence is standard protocol nowadays, but ask yourself what you want to get out of Twitter. Your objectives and goals will dictate how you use the service.

Social Profile
Create a Google Profile and control to some extent what information people see about you online. As long as your profile is set to public, it will appear in search results for your name. You can also link all your social profiles. This is outpost number one – spend the time, and optimize it correctly.

Social Curation
Delicious and Diigo are the only two tools for this category. These bookmarking tools have proven that they can scale and have a solid track record. There are pros and cons to both, but they both achieve the same objective: tagging, saving, and storing bookmarks. The nice thing about Diigo is that it can save all new bookmarks automatically to Delicious. This gives you peace of mind knowing your digital data is archived.
Video and Photo Sharing

Thanks to the advent of mobile technology, faster and more accessible broadband and sites that host, broadcast and share consumer generated content, the video revolution is upon us and has been for some time now. Social media, is well, social. Stories get people talking. Create informative videos that are relevant to your messaging and brand, encourage others to share it and to create their own video content. Viral videos are rare and lots of factors determine if something will go viral. If your content is good and worth sharing, people will take notice.

YouTube reigns supreme in this category and rightfully so. YouTube is yet another Google owned property (are you starting to see a common theme here?). YouTube makes it extremely easy to host and stream videos. YouTube videos are easy to embed and are very shareable. Create a branded YouTube channel for your brand and always optimize your title and keywords accordingly. YouTube is a video sharing site at its core, but it’s also a massive search engine.

Pictures are worth a thousand words
Photo sharing sites are in abundance, but the two we recommend are Flickr and Google’s Picasa. Flickr has been around the longest and has lots of social components, specifically a built-in diehard community. Picasa has the same functionality with basic editing capabilities and easy bulk uploading to the web. Both services offer the basics: uploading, tagging, and sharing of photos.

In Conclusion

The number one benefit of social media marketing is gaining the all-important eyeball. It will also generate exposure for your businesses, improving traffic and build new partnerships. Start working on your toolkit today to build your Social Media platform. Just take one step at a time and you will eventually reap the benefits of your efforts.

–Susan Smith

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