Manage Your Social Media Efforts with Ease

Social Media is a great way for small businesses to improve their brand awareness and at the same time improve their level of customer service. Today, more than any time in the past, it is imperative to stay close to your customers and to monitor their feelings about your products and services. Also, it is important to stay in touch with what your customers are thinking about and doing!

Using social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can help but, how do you use and manage them? These social networks are very powerful, low cost and extremely effective at keeping you in touch with the needs and interests of your customers and industry. However, many of you fail to understand or to take advantage of these technology initiatives.

Why you may ask? It is probably because you don’t know how to use these tools efficiently. For many it seems to be so confusing and for others they cannot see spending the time to stay informed on what is going on in the social network world and at the same time contribute and share tweets, photos, videos and links.

There are some great tools that can help and outlined below are a few I would suggest you consider:

A couple of ones I would suggest checking out are: TweekDeck and Seesmic. These are fantastic applications that allow small businesses to use Personal Computers, Smartphone’s and PADs to search and seek out what people are saying about their businesses and to join in on the conversations. Both of these products are so easy to use and are available for free. The idea, behind these tools, is to make it easy for a business or person to connect and share relevant content across all the major social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and others; all within one application eliminating the time consuming efforts involved with posting to each social network site separately!

So if you think you would like to use social media more effectively and efficiently to communicate with your customers and prospects consider using one of these tools mentioned above. And, if you don’t have a Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook account for your business, you absolutely must!

Shaun

PEiR and PlanWell to Share Social Media Marketing Experiences

Social Media Update

To help our members become more aware of the features, advantages and benefits of social media and social networking, the PEiR Group team will be implementing a variety of social networking initiatives to demonstrate that all  sized reprographic businesses need to embrace this revolutionary  "technology approach" to marketing.

First it is important to get a good understanding of what social media actually is!  According to wikipedia "social media is web-based technologies that turn communication into interactive dialogues".

What web-based technologies you may ask?  Maybe you shouldn't?  There are literally thousands of providers of these technologies but for our purposes we have narrowed them down to just the following few:

1. PEiR Group's Web Site http://www.peirgroup.com/
2. PEiR's Point of View Blog http://peirgrouppointofview.blogspot.com/
3. Facebook http://www.facebook.com/arctechnology
4. Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/arctechtweets
5. Twitter http://twitter.com/thepeirgroup

All of these social media sites offer the capability for us (or you)  to communicate an appropriate message about  product and services information  to folks who want want to be informed but do not want to read emails or ordinary mailings because they are; too busy, out of date or not specific to their particular needs or interests.  Social media allows us to reach our unique audience of customers in real time 24/7/360 anywhere in the world; by using both the web and mobile computing devices like iPhone, Blackberry's, iPads and Laptops  that are connected to the Internet wirelessly.

Social Media is not about posting propaganda and advertising about your products and services on web sites but rather; Social Media is about how you can be of service to your customers and prospects.

One of the most important components in successful social media marketing implementation is building "social authority". Social authority is developed when an individual or organization establishes themselves as an "expert" in their given field or area, thereby becoming an " influencer" in that field or area. 

As an industry influencer , the PEiR Group is well positioned to help share information on the trends, best practices, business strategies and technologies that reprographers are evaluating and adopting in their businesses for the future.  How do we get that message to our target audience? Social Media!

I have posted the links to our social media sites above, please take a few moments to note and visit them, follow, and comment on what you think. I will also be updating the Point of View Blog on our next social media effort!

 How can we help you??

 Best regards,

Shaun Meany