Social media, if you believe the hype, is the most important thing you need to focus your business on right now. Just for a nice change, the hype may be justified. Social media can be hugely powerful if harnessed in the right way. Making use of the networks, tools and platforms it provides can be very useful to online PR campaigns and can help win you precious profile and attention within a busy marketplace.
Jumping straight in and getting on with it can seem tempting. None of the tools themselves are that tricky to use, and there are online tutorials aplenty to show you how to design a Facebook page or win new Twitter followers quickly. However the first few steps in social media is also where many people get turned off. If there are no quick wins or no obvious results the feeling is often that they don’t ‘get it’ or more often that it doesn’t ‘get them’ and profiles are allowed to drift into dereliction.
It’s important then to think more carefully about what you want to achieve and how you are going to go about it before getting going. Like any campaign social media activity needs to be researched, planned, implemented and evaluated, then constantly monitored and refined. That’s before you factor in making it engaging and interesting to your core audience.
Orchard works with our clients on strategies for social media, figuring out how it can be integrated into their PR plans. We also offer interactive training sessions for small groups or 4-5 people wanting more insights into how they could use social media more effectively and time to think about their own businesses, bounce ideas around an open forum and discuss how they could put those ideas into practice.
If you would like to attend one of our training sessions please contact [email protected] for more details. Our next half-day session is set for afternoon of the 15th March and still has places available.
Posted by Chris.