By John Lorince
To date in these social media columns, we’ve analyzed ways for electrical distributors to take advantage of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. We’ve received some complimentary feedback on these sites, especially via Twitter.
And on August 8, tED will be hosting the electrical distribution industry’s first Twitter chat at 10 a.m. CST.
We’re pleased to see many of you are getting more involved. Once you and your company use social media more and more, you’ll no doubt find which one works best for you.
But that doesn’t mean, for example, you can throw away any contacts with Facebook or LinkedIn just because Twitter has become your go-to social media channel. While one or more social media outlets may jump out as best for your company—the one you’ll find yourself using the most—don’t be surprised if they all end up playing a role for you and your business.
In fact, there are ways to combine all three of these social media—even along with YouTube—into a single announcement.
Here’s something we did at Leff Electric. Our company made a corporate video for our sales department. So we had some fun with it. On our Facebook page we put up a searchlight with this headline: “World premiere, next Wednesday, at 4 p.m. Come to our website and see our newest video.”
We also tweeted this with the link to the Facebook announcement. That way, we were able to use Twitter to drive people to our Facebook page. I also posted it on our company’s LinkedIn page. So by posting this item to these social media sites we were able to spread the word and drive business for the company.
On “premiere day” day at 4 p.m., I posted the video as “live” and I could go into YouTube and actually see how many people clicked and watched it. Right off the bat, 50 people were watching it. So we saw that we reached those 50 potential customers who took the time to watch the new video.
And after that we took that same video and posted it on Twitter with an “In case you missed it, here it is now” tweet.
Try to intertwine all of your social media together. Admittedly, with so many social media networks it could become overwhelming at times. Keep in mind, though, that you can use a dashboard, where you can post one time and it will go to all of your social media networks at once. If you’re unfamiliar with dashborards, this link might be helpful.
You can use dashboards to schedule social media postings for any time, even over the weekend. (Your followers might see these postings and think, “Wow, this guy is even working on Saturday!”)
But while dashboards can be helpful, be careful not to get lazy and rely on them too much. Remember that an item that is you post on Twitter may not work as well on Facebook.
Sometimes I’ll see people post something that really doesn’t fit the specific social media site they’ve chosen. You’ve probably seen examples of this yourself. What reads well as a tweet may not read very well as a Facebook post, let alone a LinkedIn announcement.
You have to think about it, experiment a little. But soon you’ll know when you have it right.
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John Lorince is the marketing manager at Leff Electric, a wholesale electrical supply distributor headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. Contact him at jlorince@leffelectric.com
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