Social media in your business

By J. Lenora Bresler, J.D., SPHR, ASC

A report from Go for the Greens Conference September 19-20, 2013

Marketing panelists at the recent NAWBO-sponsored Go for the Greens conference advised that every woman-owned business needs to have a presence on social media; however, you shouldn’t do it until you understand the various venues and have a definite plan for how your business is going to benefit. 

First, pick the one (or two) media sites that can best help your business. For example, household product sales might well benefit from being on Facebook or Pinterest, whereas business-oriented services will probably be better placed on Linked-in.  Twitter is great for brief comments that point people to websites and blogs.  If you are going to have a blog, however, you need to blog at least once a month on something of substance or it is like not refreshing your makeup – it looks great at first but bad as time goes by.

Just having a lot of friends on FB does not necessarily mean more business.  If your business is a niche market, you will probably not attract a lot of friends and that in itself can look bad.  So you probably don’t want to have a FB page unless you have a very popular product. 

The easiest social media to enter is Linked-in because you can get by with a weekly check-in.  Twitter allows you to follow your competition and seeing what gets re-tweeted can show you what is the latest trends.

Panelists urged that you consider paying someone to keep up your social media.  It is an expense that might be worth it because if you try to do it yourself, it may fall through the cracks.  Be certain, though, that the person to whom you entrust this responsibility understands that they are posting for your business and do not post their own views (politics, religion, etc.) or non-business related news under your name.  Also, that person should know (or be sent to a training) about legal issues regarding copyright, etc.

The panelists urged, however, that while it is true that “digital is forever,” and therefore a misstep can be a problem to deal with, the benefits of social media generally far outweigh the dangers.  Therefore, they urged the attendees to go forward, knowing you will make mistakes, but conscious that we all need to venture (to some extent and some more than others) into this brave, new frontier.