Good Evening, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Today’s blog will be filled with furry words of advice to help you have a fantastic social media campaign.  It’s all very much common sense, but often (this Bunny included) we get carried away with the excitement and addictiveness of Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Foursquare etc that we forget to start at the beginning.  DON”T WORRY!  It’s not to late.

You want to use a social network for business, your business, it might be a hair salon, real estate office, coffee shop, accounting firm, clothes store, product or whatever, the rules are the same for EVERYONE.  So you have decided which social networking tool or tools you want to use, now follow these steps;

1. What is the purpose of what you are doing? For your Facebook page what is the purpose?  Why are you setting it up (because it’s fun doesn’t count), I want real reasons, eg to build a relationship with my audience, to use it to find out more about them, to get my product awareness out to a wider audience etc – get the picture?  This is the same if you are choosing Twitter or LinkedIn you NEED a purpose, if you don’t have one, well it just won’t work as well, and you will find it harder to maintain.
2. What are your goals? Eg for your Facebook page you want to get 500 likers in the first month and increase the click throughs to your website by x%.  For Twitter it maybe that you want to be retweeted x number of times and gain x number of followers in the first month.  Whatever you decide that your goals are these are something that you can go back to and see how you are tracking and decide if it’s working.
3. What have you got to offer?  OR What value are you adding?  OR Why should people follow you/connect with you or like you? This is the old “what’s in it for me”.  This should interlink with your purpose, so if your purpose is to “be seen as an expert in social media” the value you add could be in unravelling the mysteries behind social media, helping people to understand it and use it to grow their business.
4. What are you going to promise? I have said this before that your followers etc have memories like elephants – they never forget.  So if you entice them to your Facebook page with the offer of free ebooks or the chance to win prizes or a daily tip, when they don’t get it they WILL rebel.  Rebelling in the social networking world means de-friending/unfollowing/disconnecting, which when you have worked SO hard to get them is not what you want.

The idea behind following these steps is that when you get stuck and think “oh no what shall I blog about, post, tweet etc.” you know what your purpose, values and goals are so it makes it easier for you to deliver.  PLUS it helps with the consistency of your message, if people know you as a social media expert, then you suddenly start rambling on about how to make apple tart, it’s kinda confusing…  They won’t know what’s happening, they will lose a bit of trust and faith, who is this flaky person that yesterday was telling us how to get more likers on Facebook and now is talking about how to get the pastry just right on an apple tart…..

If you already have your social networking set up, it is NEVER too late to go back and revisit what you are doing and why, and don’t think you have to stay with what you decide forever.  However don’t change your mind daily, but often it can take a while to find your niche that both you and your readers are comfortable with, so by all means try out a few things, but let them know.  For example, when I decided to start Mental Monday’s on this blog to review books, I said that I would see how it goes, but I am not doing it daily, only once a week.  So if say 50% of you guys don’t like it I guess you don’t tune in on Monday’s, but no one has complained yet!  But if you want to make a comment do, I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVE comments positive and negative.

Tell me below what you think or on the Social Rabbit Facebook Page.