Eileen Lonergan

Yes, you do.  AND you should want to use social media, desperately!  If you own a business or provide a service that you want to be profitable, then you should want to tell people about what you are doing, offering, selling or know.  Simple as that.  What is the realistic challenging part for many people:  I don’t know how or I don’t know what to say.   I am here to help, it is what I like to do.

The main push back I get from clients about using social media is “I don’t have time to be everywhere”.  Good point, and I appreciate you not wanting to spread yourself too thin.  But you aren’t getting off that easy.

Take a minute to think about your target market and your product.

• Are you a B2B looking for professional – use LinkedIn.
• Are you a consumer product that is mostly purchased by women – get on Pinterest.
• Do you have an audience that is between 15-29 – you will find your customers on Twitter
• Are you an interior designer | florist | apparel? Check out Instagram
• Author | Publisher – GoodReads (and of course a WordPress blog!)
• Local business – Facebook (here I would say temper your professional posts with your personal ones, but remember, people do believe in buying local and working with people they already have relationships with, so share respectfully and your friends won’t mind.  You can also set up a Page for your local business and not rely on your personal account).
• Students | developers | engineers | designers | photographers – are using Google+.  A little editorializing: I had to pull a serious connection to get a beta invite to Google+ a few summers back and once the curtain was pulled back I was a little disappointed. I guess I thought it was Times Square in there – which it isn’t; however an analysis of my site visitors this year proved that I had gotten a lot of traffic from Google+ and had made some positive connections.  It isn’t just crickets over there, you may want to check it out.

What to share:

• Answer questions that your clients ask you.  You probably get asked a question a day – turn one of those into a post
• Share a new product
• Share a favorite project
• Share industry news
• Share the good news of a colleague
• Share the work of someone else that you admire
• Share where you are going to be
• Share where you have been
• Share a book
• Share an article
• Share a prediction
• Share a fear
• Be yourself
• Be friendly
• Share humor
• Wear lipstick – opps only do that if you are going to the gym and are single
• Share pictures

How Often Do I Use Social Media:

• This one makes me a little nuts – there are a lot of factors here, but in general I suggest you put something out into the inter-web (a British friend used this term and it made me laugh) once a week.  It probably won’t take you more than 3 minutes, but could take up to 20.  If you are writing a blog post, budget an hour.  If you don’t have between 3 minutes and one hour a week to market your business, then you are off the rails.

I Don’t Know How:

• Fair enough – we can get to the technical bits in other posts – or send me an email and I can help.  I guarantee that if you take yourself over to YouTube and search something like “how to post to Facebook from my iPhone” you will get a bunch of answers.  Or go into Starbucks and look around, someone will be there to help.

As the saying goes: You Can’t Date Sitting on the Couch (or that beautiful Barcelona Chair by Mies van de Rohe pictured above) and you can’t grow your clients if they don’t know what you are doing.  You should know your target market, what appeals to them and where they hang out.  Chances are you are in your target market, so share what you like, be yourself and social media will be effective for you.

Let me know your thoughts or if you want to jump on Skype and I can show you some of the finer points of the different social platforms and how to make them work for you.