11 tips on Social Media use

I've been having some thoughts on this and really thought that some key tips may be worth posting up. Some of these will seem like teaching some people out there to suck eggs but, hey, I'm going with it anyway.

1. Learn about your business. OK that sounds flippant but if you are building a social media strategy then you need to know what areas of your business will actually benefit.
2. Build blogs! Conversational markeitng is one of the biggest themes out there and is key to building online relationships with your customers, employees and potential employees.
3. Use tags and metadata effectively. Some people claimed metadata was dead and did nothing for your site anymore, frankly they didn't know what they were talking about, metadata and tags are information about information read much more here: http://www.searchtools.com/info/metadata.html
4. Don't manipulate the social space around your company. Let the social space inform you about how you are perceived and respond appropriately.
5. Build tools to measure sentiment, they are invaluable to understanding what your audience really feels about your business. More here: http://www.tradersnarrative.com/sentiment-measures-78.html
6. Use Social Media Press Release format for any information you want to get out to the wider audience: http://socialmediareleases.x.iabc.com/2008/03/01/iabc-assumes-social-media-release-leadership-role/ for the press release format use this: http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/smprtemplate.pdf
7. Try audio and video podcasts, test both, see what your audience responds to and make it a regular release from the company.
8. Build Flickr and or Youtube channels, they really can have a great influence on the wider perception of your business. These can be particularly useful when your are running or attending events, giving people the opportunity to engage with you before they meet you face to face.
9. Don't be airbrushed into a corner. It's so, so tempting to engage a slick video production and or podcasting company but do they make the content people really watch? Luke McKend from google showed us the PWC auditor video as a great example the other day, created by the auditors themselves with no corporate input at all. it has now had over 62,000 views and is a great tool for the company see it here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56pAdTGHoqc
10. Monitor where your inbound links actually come from. If they are fom a blogger then engage them. Comment on their posts, build a relationship as best you can.
11. Go mobile! This blog can be viewed on a mobile on this address: http://sussexmatt.mofuse.mobi/ (go on, you know you want to!)

This is just 10 things I was running over today, they may not be groundbreaking but I hope there are some elements of use there for anyone reading. I'm going to have a weekly round up of things in the social space, recruitment media, whatever, I come across a vast amount of information and at the moment, I'm not getting to do a hell of a lot with it so rather than sitting on info that could help I'll share it with my lovely readers!