Ann Thaxton

If you are now beginning to explore the world of social media, and you hope to promote your business and attract clients, you want to ask yourself some important questions. Social media is a great thing, but you want to make sure that you maintain a consistent message in all of your marketing and PR communications.

1. Have you written down some goals? What do you want to achieve with social media?  

2. Have you determined how you intend to convey your primary message? If your primary message is value, how will you convey that on Facebook or Twitter?

3. What type of sentiment do you want to communicate? Sentiment is an important part of social media. Do you want to convey that you are a trusted financial investment professional? Then you don’t want to post any potentially offensive quotes.

4. When do you anticipate a return on your social media efforts and what do you define as an acceptable return? Do you want to have 3 new clients in one weeks time? Most likely, that will not happen.

But what will happen over the course of several months is that your name will get out there, people will become familiar with your services and your name will be on the top of many people’s minds.  People will start commenting on your Facebook posts and you will start some conversations online. Then you will talk to those people a couple of times a week through Facebook or Twitter and that becomes a relationship. The number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers will steadily increase and people will start mentioning that they ‘saw something about you on Facebook’. You may get a few contacts from media for quotes or interviews.

This is how social media can start for you. Social media is here to stay. The sooner you join the conversation the better.