Social Media Week

So you have a company, a blog, a tweet, whatever. How will you get people to listen to you? The pro’s gave tips last week at Bow Truss Coffee Roasters, where Doejo hosted a Social Media Week panel: “Community Building for Small Businesses.”

Here’s what I learned:

1. The power of social media should never be taken for granted. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pintrest, etc. are all great tools for building your brand and a community of followers around it. Michael Salvatore of Heritage Bicycles states that by building a tight-knit community, you’re allowing people to be apart of your family, “You invest in me, and in turn, Heritage is as much yours as it is mine.” It makes perfect sense, why do you follow certain people? Because you’re interested in what they’re doing and Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., are all ways for you to get involved. When Michael posts a picture of his son on Instagram, he’s allowing you to connect with him on a more personal level. Once you get to know the awesome person and family behind Heritage, aren’t you more likely to stop in? The answer is yes.
2. Lisa Frame, social media queen and creator of Mugshot-Monday.com and SoYeahDuh, built her community by engaging and listening. “You have to know why people should listen to you,” she points out “but you don’t always need to be the one talking.” She attacked her target market of single women who like technology by doing just so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely not as easy as Lisa made it seem to be, but defining your audience, engaging with them, and then shutting up every once in a while are all part of her secret sauce. In terms of how to reach those people, Lisa went to where the conversation already existed. How to do that these days? #tags. She recommends using IceRocket.com to figure out what’s trending. She had a “stupid” but awesome/hilarious/relatable blog, knew who she was talking to, found where they were, and started appreciating the value of a tag.  “I was tagging the weirdest stuff.. dating, bipoloar, whatever!” The result? 500K followers in a week and a half.
3. “There’s a story to everything”, Johnny Auer believes. JamCo Creative helps their clients narrate it. While Johnny and Creative Director Blake Royer, understand that the best thing a person can do when starting a company is to do it themselves, JamCo Creative lends a hand to companies they believe have great stories but need help narrating. Blake discussed the importance of visuals in this story telling process. A picture tells a thousand words has never really been more true than in the case of Instagram and all it’s success. After you’ve got a great story and some people to listen, “Collaborate” Johnny suggests, “find partners who are really cool and work with them.”