Do you like to follow or connect via social media?

Last week saw us attend a half-day business event about social media held at the Crown Plaza in the centre of Birmingham.

The event was well constructed and focused on the three main aspects of usage within Social Media, namely Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Presentations took place detailing what’s viewed as the correct usage of the various social media aspects explaining how things such as the different usage of language and grammar are important within posts and updates.

LinkedIn is aimed more towards professional usage through which people look to build and grow their contact base in order to sell themselves, their products and services. With member individuals looking to engage via comments and posts in a professional manner whilst portraying knowledge and excellence of themselves and their business.

Facebook is perhaps the most well-known social media platform, but has very different usage and purpose when compared to LinkedIn – perhaps considered by many to be more focused, on the social aspect by individual consumers building their friends. The implementation and usage of Facebook pages allow businesses to actively promote and target their own specific products and services whilst looking to maximise views via the ‘LIKE’ button.

Twitter limits the number of characters used in tweets to 140, the same being referred to in other social media platforms as comments and posts. Twitter members build their base via followers engaging in tweet usage via elements such as HashTags (#) and username (@) mentions and references.

Although a Twitter member’s tweets can be linked to their LinkedIn profile if so desired, it was advised during the seminar that this should not be done unless the individual is strict with their social media usage in how and what they tweet, post and or comment upon.

Although for business use, the usage of social media needs to be regular it does not need to be all too time-consuming and there are many social media management tools available, which allow multiple social media accounts to be accessed and managed at once.

We were all advised during the answer and question session at the end of the seminar that the use of social media primarily the likes of LinkedIn and Twitter should be engaging and not all for self-promotion and “SALES”.  Also social media “SHARES” should be of a good mixture and informative, and remember that no social media post can be deleted once indexed “Once it’s out there….it’s out there” so think before you hit the post icon.

Email marketing service providers such as the likes as ‘Constant Contact’ have been developing extra tools and options for users to make better use of plugins to help gain better awareness and build a contactable database by utilising ‘Like Pages’ through which Facebook friends are required to like a page to receive an offer such as a discount voucher.