Social Media Guidelines, Rules to Live By!

• Be refreshingly honest. Being open and upfront will win you friends, sounding like a marketing rep, a salesman or a robot with do the opposite. Let people know what you do for the company and use your real name.

• Have a clear moral compass. Google has built a simple phrase into their mission statement, “Don’t be evil”, this can be applied to your campaign. Your reputation is on the line and the last thing you want to do is get your IP address and accounts banned because of you didn’t read the terms of use.

• Be relevant. Create posts that are inspired and helpful. Share important information, do some research to assure you aren’t submitting stories identical to recent posts. Stay diverse with your topics and avoid over promoting your goals, people will know if your only goal is to promote your business. The best results come from participating in the conversation and being democratic.

• Give your campaign personality, be yourself and be real, it will go a lot further than a traditional sales approach.

• Be direct and upfront addressing negative comments, bad reviews and responses about your company. Show people you are paying attention and working to correct any issues, you won’t always win, but you will show others that you are responsive.

• Reward the positive comments and posts about your company. The negative stuff always sticks out the most, but don’t let it consume you. Keep positive commenting on blogs, forums and social new comments reinforce gratitude and will generate even more positive responses from your fans.

Keep a company blog.

As we have already stated, a blog is an online journal that displays news, opinions and posts from most
recent to oldest. It’s a platform to display information, photo’s, videos, links and mixed media. Using RSS,
you can subscribe to blogs or have others subscribe to yours.

Small businesses can really benefit from blogging. It opens direct lines of communication directly to your customers, while keeping them on topic with your mission statement while keeping them updated on company news.
• Link to your blog on your company home page.

• Encourage bloggers to publish on your behalf with no (or light) approvals on content.

• Share news, videos, information on new products and services. Respond quickly to major concerns and issues your customers care about.

• Post at least three times per week with about 150-300 words per post. The more frequent you post, the more likely your blog will have repeat readers.

• Wordpress and Blogger make it easy, take some time to learn how to use these.

• Link generously to other movers and shakers and like the Digg.com tagline, join the conversation. Encourage link exchange between bloggers. These “inbound links” are the most important measure of your searchable value and can improve your search engine performance over time.

Social Media

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies that is intended to facilitate communications, influence and interaction with peers and with public audiences, typically via the Internet and mobile communications networks.

First Post

Welcome!