It seems like in today’s market, everyone has moved beyond circulating color copies to get attention and now has a Facebook page and a Twitter account.  Many companies, however, have developed these social media tools not because they know what to do with them, but because it just seemed like the thing to do.  No one wants to be left out of a trend.  The truth is social media usage by companies is a great tool.  The challenge however, is to figure out how to make these outlets work for you versus have them become a burden with little ROI to support their time and effort.  The following tips should provide you with some guideposts along the way.

1.Understand your targeted social media channel

There are several different mainstream online social communities that are easy to set up and engage in. However, each really addresses a different type of user and by extension will address a different type of potential client base.  As a quick primer, consider the following.

Facebook – (A.K.A. “crackbook” for it’s addictive potential) Allows for rich and dynamic conversation and easy community building.  Participants have the opportunity to not only engage with you, but also with each other.  This community is valuable if you are targeting a client base that is very relationship focused.

Twitter - This networking application, allows you to push interesting information to your potential clients.  They can communicate with you as well, but it is not a tool that allows for deep conversations or multiple users cross conversing.  This community is a good place for building a client base that thrives on information and wants lots of tidbits on a regular basis… how much can you say in just 140 characters?  Take it as a business challenge.

NING - NING has some great features for developing a very dynamic social community.  You can design your entire community to perform as your primary website would by ,not only having space for postings, but also allowing you to include longer formatted articles, embedded video etc.  The downside of NING is that it is a social community that you completely create from scratch.  It does not offer the same capacity to collect users who are just hanging out on the application, like Facebook does.  On the other hand if you are targeting potential clients who are information junkies, (sniff, sniff, the first one’s for free) and thrive on multimedia presentation, this is the place for you.

Learn as much as you can about the various social media usage models to choose the one that meets your companies and customers usage model.

2.Spend the time to create dynamic kick off content. Ok, you have selected your home base for your social community.  Once you have set up your profile, you are not ready to open the doors to potential clients yet.  If you want to get, and more importantly keep, new potential clients interacting with your community, you need to set the stage.  Make sure when those first users come to your site there is something for them to interact with.  This will prevent them from feeling like the first ones who have shown up at the party.   Get it rockin’ set out the free beer, invite some pretty girls and THEN bring in your guests.

Take the time to prepare your site for launch.

3.Get some users to register. Once you have selected the site, and prepared it for the rich dialogue to come, it’s time to go out and get some users.  The biggest tip I can give you here is that it is not the number of users you generate; it is the quality of users.  Five hundred community memebers, 498 of who are friends and family isn’t cool.  You want to collect people who are actually potential clients.  Here are a few things you can do to collect users.

·         Send an invite to all of your current contacts.

·         Post a link to your site on other like-minded communities.

·         Add a direct link to your community on your email signature and from your website.

It’s not how many users you have, it’s how many potential customers you have on your site.

4.Get the conversation started. A great community is defined by how interactive it is.  To enhance the dialogue in your community, post questions instead of just posting content.  Behave as if you are at a virtual cocktail hour.  If you were mingling, you would seek out new people to talk to, pour them a drink to loosen them up and engage them in conversation by asking them about themselves, and being interested in what they have to say.  Do the same thing in your virtual community.  Be an active host and seek out users and entice them to join the conversation, by asking them direct questions, just don’t write your hotel room number on the virtual napkin.

Online communities are like an online cocktail party.  Keep the conversation flowing.

5.Be Human. As a company entity on a social media platform, it is easy to forget that social media is about connecting to people.  To truly connect with people you have to be a human and real to yourself in your communications.  Company sites that focus on pushing out marketing pieces and not on interacting and allowing people to see the real person behind the curtain make a huge mistake.  People do not connect with companies they connect with people.

Let people see the person behind the company, through your posts and comments.