11.09.2010

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Social Media Messaging for Your Small Business

You’ve got your blog, pages, feeds and streams all nicely branded and ready to go. What will you talk about and who will do the talking for your business? For most small businesses there won’t be a conversation happening already about a small business. You’ll have to reach out and start conversations. Conversations require content, and that’s where this quick guide comes into play. Read it and comment with any questions you may have. We’d be glad to help if we can!

Social Messaging for Small Business in 5 steps:

1. Identify who will be doing the messaging and assess their knowledge of your business – If you’re the one writing tweets and making videos, it will be easy for you to create content that is on-message and factually accurate. If you’ve decided to have an employee take care of social messaging for your business, you may want to monitor that person closely for the first month or so and create a list of frequently asked questions with supporting answers based on your conversations. A FAQ document will help you avoid answering the same question multiple times if your employee forgets!

2. Pick primary messaging types and supply necessary platform training – What sort of messages will you be using in your conversations with customers? Video? Photos? Audio? Text? Figure out what makes the most sense for your business and make sure everybody who will be involved knows how to complete each step of your production process.

3. Create your first week of messaging and do a bit of role playing to work through potential customer responses – That sounds like a lot of work because it is. You can make or break your social media presence in the first week after launch. Take the needed time to make sure everybody at your small business who plays a role in your social media presence is on the same page and understands what makes a good response and how your brand voice sounds.

4. Establish a routine for handling customer feedback online – Once your messaging is outward bound, it’s important to have a set routine for the way you handle all but the wildest customer inquiries and reviews. If a customer has a product- or service-related question, do you have a point person identified to answer? If a customer received bad service and is distraught, do you have an approved way to make things right so you’re not inventing a new answer for every question? Figure out how you’d like things to go and direct them accordingly as often as you can.

5. Brainstorm some campaign ideas and put some tactics to the test – Once you’re comfortable with how messages are flowing back and forth between your small business and its fans, it’s time to explore creative ways to market your business. Do you have a community project you could partner with, inviting your customers to get involved? Do you have a product line that isn’t selling well at full price but that might move quickly if offered at a discount to your loyal following? Decide how you’ll track your progress and dig in. This is where social media really starts to get fun!

Any questions or comments? Say hello below!