Social Media Development For Businesses

Social Media Development is a hot topic in the business world right now, many want to (some need to) target customers via these fast developing channels. At Cookies & Java we are fortunate enough to have some great in-house knowledge and experience. A lot of which comes from our resident blogging expert Jo Alcock who speaks regularly about the topic at conferences and has attracted over 700 followers on Twitter.

In this guide we’ll quickly go over some of the basic thinking behind the topic and we’ll also show how we helped a client in this area. 

Let’s Talk Strategy – The Marketing Basics

The first step any marketer needs to make is to objectively look at the wide range of social media options out there and consider the relevance to their target market and the potential ROI. While certain methods and channels are considered hot topics it could be very time consuming mistake to assume they must be of value to your business.

In It For The Long Term – Don’t Make It An Event

While these channels can certainly accelerate growth for business the reality for many will be nurturing ongoing growth over a long period of time. So if you do decide to enter this world be prepared to put the hours in regularly supplying content to your users, or to outsource your businesses social media development tasks.

The good news is there are many tools out there to help automate the distribution of your content. For example the blogging platform WordPress now supports the automatic posting of new blog notifications via Twitter. Also most social networking sites now support automatic posting of existing blog content on company profile pages.

Interact, Analyse, Grow

Of course what constitutes good content in your target markets mind is unique to your situation; anything not relevant and purely promotional will be simply seen as spam. Do your customers want company news? Or do they really want interaction?

It’s also important to consider the feedback loop, there are many online tools which can help with this, for example the excellent FeedBurner service now owned by Google is an essential tool for anyone with an RSS feed.

Case Study – Gentech International

Since our relationship began with Gentech we’ve helped them produce and distribute news stories direct to customers via a newsletter.  When we re-developed their Web site in early 2008 we had social media strongly in mind. We developed a bespoke new CMS driven news section that allowed users to subscribe via their chosen news reader and receive instant notification of new stories. In July 2008 we took this up a level with the creation of company profile pages on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook all of which we configured to automatically updated with the latest Gentech news.

Now Gentech stakeholders can receive the latest company news via whichever medium they find most convenient.