“How (if at all) are you using social networking in your business, aside from driving sales?” asks Ross Easton, the Public Affairs and Communications Manager at Scottish and Southern Energy plc. He points out that “Southwest Airlines in the States is using twitter primarily for brand promotion and customer retention online.”
Driving sales is usually the top priority for everybody! But there are other uses for social media on the web. In some cases, as with some of our city clients, they just want to make sure that the residents and employers in the city know what’s going on. A great version of this is the Facebook page for Suisun City in California. They are putting new status lines up on a regular basis, just telling people about events and new interesting things going on in the city. Here’s the latest one… Tom Hanks Supports Solano College Theatre with Endowment.
Another social networking tool that Placemaking Group is using right now should also be mentioned. LinkedIn is a great way to find individual resources. For instance, in Ross Easton’s case, perhaps Scottish and Southern Energy is looking for someone with particular expertise. LinkedIn has become a great way to find that person.
Another use of Social Media is to use Twitter as a way to build customer relations, as Ross mentions that Southwest Airlines is doing. It is important to make sure you have all the right keywords in your tweet. Then when people (especially journalists) are searching keywords, your tweets get picked up. At the Placemaking Group, we’ve used Twitter to help land stories in print and web.
I just subscribed to your RSS feed, not sure if I did it precisely though? Fine article by the way.