Getting Started with Social Media – Part 2

The next step you want to determine is what message you want to convey across all of your social sites. This can be difficult to determine. If your company has a mission statement you can use that as a basis. If not you need to ensure that you can come up with all kinds of informative and helpful content.

While this content does not necessarily have to be your own it must be relevant. If you run a health and wellness company then posting news and updates from professional medical journals is a good idea.

The key with running a successful social media site is to share information, not just your own, but information from others. To really interact with your visitors you want to have content that is engaging, entertaining, educational, and newsworthy as well as thought provoking.

There are several social media sites and you should choose wisely which ones you want to use. It is always best to use your accounts regularly. So while it is easy to set up lots of sites you must be willing to actually use them.

Take a look at the popular sites and see which would benefit you the most:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Skype
• Pinterest

One thing to keep in mind is that these sites are always changing and new sites appear and disappear. Again look at the ones which your closet competitor is using and try to see how long they have been using them. Then you can follow suit and sign up with the same ones.

Even if you do sign up for several sites you will probably find that there will be one or two that perform better for you. Plus you will see which ones you actually enjoy using. It won’t hurt to leave the others alone and concentrate on building a good reputation in one or two sites.

As we mentioned before you can hire someone to maintain your accounts for you. If you prefer to manage them yourself there are support tools which you can use.  A couple of free tools which you can use include:

• HootSuite
• TweetDeck
• Social Oomph

These sites allow you to plan out your promotions and schedule them in advance.  So you can easily spend a couple of hours scheduling content which can then be set and forgotten about. These tools will really help you save time and plan your promotions in advance.