Social media for business
I have recently begun creating the social media online presence for RedGuava. First step was deciding which social media channels to be a part of. My decisions were: Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook. Following is how I decided to setup these social media channels, and some learnings I had along the way.
I have a personal twitter account (jfriedlaender) that I already use, but the business needs its own independent twitter account also. I have now setup "redguavacompany" as the official twitter account for RedGuava, unfortunately "RedGuava" was taken a few years ago and sits fairly dorment. There is rumours that twitter will make these dorment accounts available at some stage, here's hoping.
What I really wanted was a way to have a twitter account that all tweets from staff at RedGuava could be aggregated into. After some searching I found twitter lists were perfect for this. I have setup a list at "redguavacompany/staff" that includes the company tweets, as well as any from staff at RedGuava. This is the address I have linked our website to (http://www.twitter.com/redguavacompany/staff).
The next step is knowing when someone mentions or messages to either my personal or the company twitter account. For my personal account, I already log in regularly and also track this from my android phone, so really the company account was the main concern. Using twitters search page, I created RSS feeds of the searches "redguava" and "redguavacompany". I then have these RSS feeds on my android phone also, so I can track any activity relating to RedGuava.
Finally, I wanted an easy dashboard to monitor both my twitter accounts (and other social media), after trying a couple of options, I have chosen Tweetdeck to perform this service. It has a very configurable dashboard and alert system, and also integrates the twitter search functionality mentioned above (rendering my RSS feeds semi-redundant, although I do like how they present on my phone). I have also installed the tweetdeck application on my android phone, however I am still deciding if it is my preferred android twitter client.
Creating a company in LinkedIn was very easy (assuming you already have a linkedIn account like I did). I set up some basic information, uploaded a logo, and changed my personal profile to reflect my new role at RedGuava. I also added linkedIn to my tweetdeck dashboard to track any alerts (but turned off "connections" and "groups" alerts).
The facebook setup was also very straight forward, however I have some more work to do in understanding how I best get value from my facebook page for business (I have not been much of a facebook user in the past, linkedIn and Twitter were much more familiar to me).
Summary
Getting a very basic social media presence started was fairly simple, the key however will be taking advantage of these mediums. They can do more harm than good if left unattended, a deserted twitter account is not a selling point for your business.