There are so many articles about social media all over the newspapers at the moment: companies personally addressing customer complaints, celebrities taking over Twitter, books being published in excerpts of 140 characters…but what does social media mean for your company? And do you need it?

If you’re considering social media, you should think carefully about what you want to achieve from using it. The primary reason to use it is to engage the customer; creating two-way communication shows you care about the customer and want to listen to them. Although their feedback may not always be positive, it’s important to handle the rough with the smooth and provides a valuable lesson in PR.

Timely and regular communication is expected in what has become an extremely fast-paced society. Ensuring you update at regular intervals means your community can begin to grow organically as more people find out about you. I’ve seen too many campaigns started without forward planning and abandoned after a couple of months. Key campaigns that are marked in the calendar should have social media planned into the list of activities surrounding them.

So what types of social media do you need? Let’s consider three of the most popular ones: blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

Blogs

Blogs are a great way to show all sorts of information: product launches, how-to’s, introducing employees. It combines video, images, and text into articles which are designed to be left online long-term. High quality articles provide a valuable resource and can increase site traffic, which helps to build an online reputation. You can set up hosted blogs, or host them yourself, and most are customisable so you can skin it to look like you main website.

Facebook

Facebook allows you to create ‘Fan pages’ where users can ‘fan’ your company (or sometimes individual products) and they can leave comments or start discussions on the built-in discussion board. Facebook pages aren’t very customisable in terms of design, but they’re really easy to set up. They are plenty of fun and have loads of useful apps that allow you to run polls, post videos from Youtube, and even enter your own custom html. Just starting to crop up now are shops within Facebook, so expect to see more of these in the next year.

Twitter

Twitter utilises real-time updates of up to 140 characters. It’s a great communication tool which provides a lot of flexibility in the way it’s used. You can talk, discuss, listen, it’s up to you. I’d always recommend keeping a search for your company name as an RSS feed – it’s good to find out what people are saying about you. Twitter needs to be updated much more regularly than other forms of social media and this needs to be taken into consideration. Do you have something you want to say every couple of days?

Whatever you choose to do, you should always reserve your company name as a username on sites to prevent someone passing themselves off as you. Research your competitors and see if they’re doing it already – you have to decide whether you’re going to be the first movers, or the “me too’s”.

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