Social Media and Business
Over the years, according to our count, we've done maybe six or seven seminars about business and social media. We've had our NTPDA members speak to the issue and brought in some social media experts. It was all meant help our members better engage with their customers and, in the end, sell more product.
Last week we thought it might be interesting to do a social media assessment of our regular members. You know, see what social media channels they are on, what they are doing with social media and get an idea of the utilization. It was very informative. We looked at blogging, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
The results were mixed.
We didn't find many of our regular members who blogged. There were some that use YouTube and fewer who used Twitter or Instagram. It seems the social media platform of choice is Facebook with over 60% of our members engaged there.
We next looked at how often our members posted and what they posted about. We found, not surprisingly, that most were featuring products for sale and some special sales they were having. Very few members who posted on Facebook posted much else. The YouTube users, and there were a couple, did a mixture of "behind the scenes" and "how to" videos and many of those were done well.
We did find lots of Twitter accounts that were started a couple of years ago but then abandoned after only a few dozen tweets. Some members link their Facebook posts to Twitter so when they post on Facebook those posts automatically go right to their Twitter feed.
It was enough data to get us to thinking that maybe it's time to do a refresher, here on our Blog, about best social media practices. What each platform is good at and what they should be used for. You see, each really has a different audience.
So, that's what we're going to do. Over the next several weeks we'll post some helpful thoughts about each platform and offer up some best practices. We're hoping it will help and we promise not to go too deep into the weeds.
In the meantime if you've got thoughts about the use of social media for business let us know with a comment here. Just go to the comment section and post your thoughts about social media. We'll not make those public because, well not everybody wants to air their laundry. Right?
Thank you for being a member of NTPDA. We hope you'll find this information valuable.