Social Media for Beginners

by Stephanie Weg

If you are the owner of a business, responsible for marketing, communications or any other form of conversation in and around your business, you will have heard plenty of reasons why Social Media is important, is growing, in one word, is the future. You are quite aware that this is a hot topic and that you should be doing something. The question is, where to start in this chaos of options, risks and platforms?
This blog entry will provide you with a free, easy and simple approach to get started with Social Media. There are three steps:

Step 1: Don’t panic

Step 2: Have a look

Step 3: Put a Social Media strategy into place that fits your business, your clients and provides an ROI.

Step 1: Don't panic.
Social Media is hyped-up, controversial a red-hot topic. Today. Don’t let this deceive you: Social Media is no magic, but purely another step in the integration of technology in our lives. Remember the introduction of television and computers or the internet boom. All of these things where extremely big events at the time, but today, these technologies and ways of communication are a normal part of everyone’s life.
The best thing you can do is not to let this topic intimidate you, and to have an objective, business-minded look at it.

This brings us to Step 2: Have a look.
The great thing about Social Media is that most of the tools are available for free. In other words: Nothing stops you from testing some platforms and getting a feeling for what these things actually are with very little investmant, often even without registering. So do exactly this: Have a look at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other tools which might be relevant for your company. Ask young people in your company to give you a quick tour – they will be happy to do so. Get a feeling yourself what all of this is about and how things work in the Social Web. This will allow you to have ideas for your business and also to appreciate the risks in a realistic way.

And then, once you know what this is all about, Step 3: Put a Social Media strategy in place. If you are convinced that there is no added value to being represented, consider at least listening to what others might say about you out there. If you are not convinced, read my article “Is Social Media optional?” with a critical discussion of this question.
If you do want to implement Social Media in your business, the best thing is to follow a structured approach. This helps to ensure that the hype and the factor of unknown around Social Media cannot distract from the fact that you want to use these new technologies for your business and that there should be some ROI.

YNovation has developed a framework for this: The SOCIAL approach. It ensures that you put a Social Media strategy in place which fits your business, your clients and provides an ROI. The blog articles in the next weeks will explain this framework in detail. Stay tuned!