posted by: Tara

Here are five ways to use Social Media for things that you are already doing. Time is precious in the business world and with these 5 strategies you are sure to save time while effectively interacting with more potential clients.

"1) Follow up with prospects So you go to a Chamber event and meet someone that has asked you to follow-up. Traditionally, you might send an email a week later or call them up and leave a voice mail. What if instead you found them on LinkedIn, asked to be connected and then shared an information rich article that contained tips about the very thing you chatted about at the Chamber mixer. Do you think that next meeting might get started a little quicker towards your objectives? I sure do.

2) Stay top of mind with customers Staying in front of your customers and continuing to educate and upsell them is a key ingredient to building marketing momentum and few businesses do it well. This is an area where a host of social media tools can excel. A blog is a great place to put out a steady stream of useful information and success stories. Encouraging your customers to subscribe and comment can lead to further engagement. Facebook Fan pages can be used as a way to implement a client community and offer education and networking opportunities online.

3) Keep up on your industry Keeping up with what’s happening in any industry is a task that is essential these days. New monitoring services and tools steeped in social media and real time reporting make this an easier task. Subscribing to blogs written by industry leaders, competitors and journalists and viewing new content by way of a tool such as Google Reader allows you to scan the day’s content in one place.(Of course, once you do this you can teach your customers how to do it and make yourself even more valuable to them – no matter what you sell.)

4) Provide a better customer experience It’s probably impossible to provide too much customer service, too much of a great experience, but you can go nuts trying. Using the new breed of online tools you can plug some of the gaps you might have in providing customer service and, combined with your offline touches, create an experience that no competitor can match. Using an online project management tool such as Central Desktop allows you to create an entire customer education, orientation, and handbook kind of training experience one time and then roll it out to each new customer in a high tech client portal kind of way. This approach can easily set you apart from anyone else in your industry and provide the kind of experience that gets customers talking.

5) Network with potential partners Building a strong network of strategic marketing partners is probably the best defense against any kind of economic downturn. If you identify a potential strategic partner, find out if they have a blog and start reading and commenting. Few things will get you noticed faster than smart, genuine blog comments. Once you establish this relationship it might make sense to offer a guest blog post. If your use a CRM tool you’ve probably noticed that most are moving to add social media information to contact records, add your potential partners social media information and you will learn what’s important to them pretty quickly."

Source: Duct Tape Marketing

• March 16th, 2010
• Add new comment
• 
• Tags: calgary marketing, marketing, seo pr, social media, social seo