Short and sweet - social media for business xo

I believe everything in moderation, be sensible and practical. Have a social business? Make sure you are regularly on your chosen social platforms every day. Need a break and want to have a laugh? Scroll through your feed and find some funnies, no biggie.
It surprises me when I talk to friends that are adamant that they hardly use social media or they insinuate that is not a good thing to be doing with your time. It’s like some people feel guilty and embarrassed about it and label it as bad. I heard one discussion where people were actually trying to outdo the other in their boasts of how little they use social media!
Not me though. I study long distance and work on the computer, so finding myself often on my laptop is often finding myself on social media networks, my green circle of online presence lighting up like a lighthouse in the evening.
I don’t want to be all side tracky but this is my first blog post on Medium and I am getting some feels — I wish I could choose different colored fonts. There, I said it. Also why was I taught to spell colored ‘coloured’ at school when every blog site I have ever used lets me know with an angry red scribble that in no uncertain terms is colored to be spelled ‘coloured’.
How does social media help small businesses and not for profits
Social Media Applications (SMA’s) are for any business regardless of size. Tickets to board the social media train start at $0.00 — an example is setting up a Facebook page for your business for $0.00. Once you understand what to do it’s easy to monitor, you just need to put regular hours in to monitoring leads and attending to your customers for as long as your business exists. It helps that anything you need to know can be looked up on YouTube.
By organising someone in to a specific role for social media relations within your business, you can listen out for leads on what customers want. If you are a one man band you can do this yourself. Just how many SMA platforms you use depends on whether you have someone to put the hours in that are required for each. The more could be the merrier, but make sure you identify the merits of using each one and what targets and goals of your business strategy they will help your business reach, your SMA/s should be set up to help compliment/aid/achieve your original business plan.
MYOB Digital Nation New Zealand found in a recent survey that 51% of businesses can be found online, over half of these businesses have increased their sales and had happier customers because of this. But if you don’t respond to customer’s questions on a social network it wont help you at all, but it will make you look very bad, largely because of what the person/people you have ignored will start saying about your (probably online in your very own space). So keep that in mind, but realise that you are allowed to enjoy yourself too! If you are a bit of a character, then put that personality out there online!
Crazy cool fact — in the USA 97% of non-profit organisations use social media!

No time to stay at your desk?
Fear not, take your work with you! All the SMA’s you use for your business are mobile and found on your smart phone. These are called Native Apps and are designed to work in with the features on your phone often enhancing your chosen social media platform for ease of use.
How might the use of social media differ for small and large businesses?
The differences can often be in how much money you are working with. The jackpot with social media though is that the size of your social media projects will reflect the size of your business and you won’t need extra money for social media until your business has it.
A larger business can financially commit more people to the trawling of social media sites (monitoring and listening out for key comments) whereas a smaller organisation may only be able to allocate up to ten hours a week (or much less) to developing it’s SMA standing. Another difference for a small business is whether or not they even need more than a static SMA page that just provides contact details and hours. If you are not looking to expand or are unable to take on anymore clients, then don’t put hours in to this.
The B2B
B2B? Business to business. Looking to source/buy products, get your brand known or collaborate with other SME’s (small to medium sized enterprises), then LinkedIn is your best friend. I can’t wait to create my own! There aren’t more than 100 million LinkedIn users for no reason. LinkedIn is also your friend if you are an individual ready to make your mark!
With social media networks things are going to change for the better, you are going to be able to understand industry trends better (what direction they are going in), what the current ones are, and see for yourself where there are gaps for your business to jump in to!
Jacqueline Eade — Social Media for business strategist & web based graphic designs
