Is Your Business Social?

With all the talk of social media in recent months a lot of companies have jumped on the social media bandwagon in an attempt to kick their online marketing and communications into the twenty-first century.

Maybe your business is like this?

You know: you’ve got a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account; you’re maybe posting pictures to Flickr, and monitoring realtime streams for mentions of your brand.

Trouble is: Just having the gear, doesn’t make you the belle of the ball. The tools per se don’t make you social: it’s what you do with them.

Successful online marketing with social media is about your mindset, and the communications strategy you use!

10 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Business

Do you:

• never answer questions on Twitter just to be helpful?
• forget to respond to comments on your Facebook Fan Page the same day they’re posted?
• find yourself erasing the comments that don’t make you look good?
• conveniently forget to be honest when you mess up in public?
• police every move your people make on social media?
• always – bottom line – focus on selling more stuff
• jump in with social media tools before thinking about your communication goals and desired outcomes?
• forget to measure success and failure and fail to learn from it?
• feel insecure when promoting other people’s services and products online?
• never bother to look for new and emerging channels ?

Bonus Question?

• Do you think you’ve got social media totally nailed?

So what about you?

If you’re answering YES to lots of these, you might want to think again about your online marketing and communications strategy.

Maybe you’re missing the point. Or maybe you’re not quite seeing the return on investment (ROI) you thought you’d be getting once your business went social.

Go on: take another look at your online marketing and how you’re using tools like Facebook, corporate blogs, Twitter and so on. Is your business really social ?

Image:FlickrCC