Every business is trying to figure out how to ride the wave of social media to business success. Unfortunately, old business habits and ways do not work on the new media. Straight up advertising is not going to garner the attention that it once had, and will entirely turn off those who are using social media. While a good Facebook page design is a great start to a social media campaign, your business should understand what social media is for and how to use it so that you don’t turn off the very people that you are trying to reach.
Types of Social Media
The social media landscape is bound to change even while you are reading this. The thing that any business needs to know is what social media to use and how to use it. Facebook has over 800 million users, and Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site. Twitter is still huge, and Google+ has been slow to develop, but may be coming on. LinkedIn is the largest business site. Each of these websites has its own sets of unwritten rules on how it should be used.
Twitter and Pinterest
If you don’t know by now, Twitter will allow you to relay messages and links in 140 characters or fewer. That is not a lot, but people are communicating through this medium. Books and stories have been written in this way, so it must be usable. As a business, you want to make sure that you are engaging the other people in the community. Ask a question, use hash tags, and do not use several tweets to create one message. No one wants to piece together that mess. Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site on the net. This site acts like a corkboard where people can pin the things that interest them, and find things that are like what they have pinned to their board. It is important to know that a majority of the people that use Pinterest are women.
With Facebook having gone public, it is important to keep up on its developments. As it becomes more profit driven, Facebook will face the problem of trying to turn a social media website into an advertising juggernaut. If the site goes too far in its advertising ventures, you can bet that people will leave it in droves for one simple reason Facebook forgot why people joined in the first place. People want to interact with others in a social way. Any company that insists in only putting on static advertisements will face an unmeasured backlash. In order to engage the Facebook community, companies need to create a Facebook page design that reflects their personalities. In any social media campaign, it is important for the company to embrace the fact that the only way to make a profit is to not look like that is what you are only doing. Be sure to have a personality, and have messages related to but beyond what you are selling.