What does Social Media mean for you and your business?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Probably both. Having a pic and bio of all prominent staff is a common thing these days. Check out this one...
I see they've gone for the wacky photos. If you're an organisation where the majority of your workforce are young, hip and good looking then it works to your advantage. It's been proven that in business people are attracted towards looks, just like in real life, so a good looking organisation will be more successful than an ugly one. Ridiculous and pathetic, but true. So it's harder to swing if the majority are old, untrendy and ugly, although a good photographer and Photoshop can work wonders.
I originally liked the anonymity of the internet. There was no way to tell if someone was a 16 year old kid in their parents' house or a 40 year old pro. It was pretty meritocratic. But now people's images are all over the net. It seems any self-respecting blog or LinkedIn profile should have a photo of you looking cool and clever. A disadvantage to those of us who will never look either.
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What about us business owners who are neither young, nor hip, nor good looking? Especially not good lucking? What are we to do!?
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The problem that arises with images is that it takes what was awesome about the Internet (anonymity) and introduces a strong potential for customers to use even something as simple as headshots to work around merit-based selection and go to racial, age or gender factors. People only wanted to hire young, white males can easily look to see what companies are loaded with them and not work with others. There is no law, nor is there a way to really make a law, to make that illegal.
The anonymity of the Internet was a huge boon for minorities, the young and women in its early days because with anonymity came equality.
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@tonyshowoff said:
What about us business owners who are neither young, nor hip, nor good looking? Especially not good lucking? What are we to do!?
Hire hot people. People who own strip clubs are almost always old and ugly, but the draw isn't the owners.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@tonyshowoff said:
What about us business owners who are neither young, nor hip, nor good looking? Especially not good lucking? What are we to do!?
Hire hot people. People who own strip clubs are almost always old and ugly, but the draw isn't the owners.
Note to self, hire strippers. Got it.
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Here's a current snap shot of our corporate offices:
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@tonyshowoff said:
Here's a current snap shot of our corporate offices:
While that's nice and all, I'm not sure I agree with your choice of curtains.
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Interesting social media question pops up... about Instagram...
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/797834-instagram-for-business -
@scottalanmiller T2 Tea is utilising their Instagram account pretty well
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It is the backbone of the business.
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"Needing a social media presence" could accurately be described as corporate peer pressure IMO. Facebook has successfully boiled the frog, so to speak, and as of late 2013 there are significant ongoing costs for maintaining a decent presence on the site. In my days as a marketing guy, my Facebook posts as of late 2014 had an average organic reach of about 1-2% to the people who had already liked our page... it was just outrageous. This post has some recent stats, which you could use to help make the case that being on Facebook nowadays is a needless marketing expense with little business value for newcomers/small businesses. The scary thing, as one commenter points out, is that those numbers are the average for all posts, paid or unpaid. If you plan on using Facebook for "free marketing" you are going to have a bad time. They may not want to hear that, though...
With that said, if you're working with people that really want you to have a social media presence, I'd recommend going with Twitter right now. It has a large userbase, including a lot of businesses, but my favorite part about it is that you really don't need to write any novels or take a lot of photos to maintain it. A lot of your tweets can be links to information that you consider relevant to clients/potential clients, like security bulletins. Then you can put your feed on your site with a widget - there are many WordPress plugins out there to help you accomplish that goal. Then there's a part of your site that can easily be updated with new stuff without having to write out whole blog posts.
It's also easier to use Twitter for direct calls to action with the Twitter Cards feature that came out a little while ago. For example, if you have a mailing list and tweet about it you can have a link to subscribe right on the tweet itself.
If you have staff active on Twitter, you can have the company follow them and retweet things they say that's relevant to what you do. Then you can have the "look we are real people" factor without having a discrete company directory. If I were into buzzwords I would describe these people as brand ambassadors but let's not go down that road...
Long story short, social media for businesses is most likely going to be seen as one of this decade's ridiculous tech fads in retrospect, but at the moment it is still going strong. In my opinion, Twitter has the best effort/expense to results ratio right now.
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@WingCreative said:
. In my days as a marketing guy, my Facebook posts as of late 2014 had an average organic reach of about 1-2% to the people who had already liked our page... it was just outrageous.
That's because Facebook purposely limits your post to viewing by a percentage. If you want more viewing you have to pay. If you pay for more likes you are just shooting yourself in the foot as 1.) most of the ones liking it are fake accounts, 2.) you then have to pay more for the real people to see the posts.
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I have paid for FB advertising it has worked well for one of the things I have done and not at all for the other. So it is a hit and miss thing. Boosting it's self is dumb but doing the ads is helpful.
I have decent facebook stats for our own usage. 5 clients in the last 6 months have found us there. So Facebook is worth it for the little bit of time it takes to update things. It's not that facebook doesn't work for free advertising. You just have to know how to use it. Part of it has to do with how social you are in general, and how socially appropriate you are as well. Twitter is ok but I have never gotten any new business from there. Have I gotten new followers and people retweeting my posts? Yes but what good has that done me, well nothing as of yet. Is it still a valuable tool? YES! Any positive marketing that isn't rejected is good.
Obviously the best place I have found for marketing is online Forums. And yes that does work. In the last 3 years NTG has gotten over 250 clients from them or things associated with them. Not bad for a little time investment.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Minion-Queen said:
Not bad for a little time investment.
Little?
True you and I spend hours a day but it's worth it
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Social Media was not so great for this company today. Think before you post.
The posted a picture of a bad check written to them. Then when people said it was tacky they kept defending the post.
Edit: whoops forgot to edit out the info myself. Fixed. None of the removed information was done on the companies upload.
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Like I said Socially Appropriate.
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Facebook and Twitter are for consumers. I don't see any benefit for B2B (business to business) companies to use it. My Marketing Manager disagrees though
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For me, social media is the good platform to remain updated with the world through communication, diverse updates etc. For business purpose, it is one of the best resource to expand business very easily in the market.
