Getting Started...

Lets have a quick look at some figures to allow you to gauge whether this is actually worth spending any time on.

• Facebook has approximately 140 Million Members and 18 Million Unique Visitors a month in the UK.
• You Tube exceeded 100 million unique visitors in March 2009
• Twitter increased by 1382 percent to 7 million users in February 2009 from 12 months previous, and of those lets say all of them use twitter on a daily basis.

So even if a minute number of these unique visitors were to visit your site each month, let's say 0.01% of these visitors, your website will have exposure to an additional 24,700 unique visitors.... and that’s before we take continued growth rates in the industry into consideration.

Still here?  Great. 

Now that you have a basic understanding of the numbers lets look at what you need to do.

Email

For each of the below sections you will need to sign up with some kind of user name and password.  Often the user name will be an email address so prior to reading on below you should take this opportunity to ask you system administrators to set up a single social media email address,

• socialmedia@mycompany.com

or one for each section,

• facebook@mycompany.com
• youtube@mycompany.com
• twitter@mycompany.com

Branding

All Social Networking sites provide you with a certain level of customization options.  These include backgrounds, logos, or full control over the html + css.

It is important to know your branding guidelines before you start spreading the social word, so you should meet with your marketing department and get a hold of the following as a minimum;

• Square Logo approximately 240x240 pixels in size (most social networking sites will resize this to fit so it’s best to go a little bigger then required)
• Hexidecimal chart of available corporate colours (remember that no matter how hard you try to convince the marketing manager sky blue isn't the same as ski-ish blue)
• Mission Statement for your company, keep it to 30 words or less
  

Finally, remember to keep your social networking URL’s as consistent as possible.  For example, it is much easier to remember

• http://www.twitter.com/yourcompany
• http://www.facebook.com/yourcompany
• http://www.youtube.com/yourcompany

is much easier to remember than http://www.twitter.com/yourcompany

FACEBOOK

It's free, it's easy, and you only need an email to set up an account (have you set those accounts up yet?)

Yes of course you could use your own email address.  But what happens if you decide to leave or if you move into a new role? It becomes a pain to update or change.

Creating a Facebook Page

Visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and select what type of category your Business Facebook page should be associated with.  It could be a Local Business, Brand or Product, or an Artist, Brand or Public Figure.  (note that non-profit options are under Brand or Product).

For this example I'm going to choose Brand or Product and choose Website.

Once you've chosen you Brand or Product add the name of the business/brand/product/artist, or in this case the Website….. for example “Your Company”.

The next page will allow you to either sign up with a new account (which is recommended), or with an existing account. 

Sign up with your new business account email, remember the one you had created during the introduction, and you're done!

The next steps are all about creating your social profile, setting up events that you will be holding, uploading some videos that you've previously shot of such events, some photo's of your company advertisements, a list of links to your website detailing the services you offer etc etc. 

You should also take this opportunity to upload the profile image, in this case your logo, and tailor the page colours to your own branding guidelines.

TWITTER

tweets, twits, twitters, twitterific, twitscoop, twats...... the list goes on for as long as there are as many questions about what twitter actually is.

What is it? How do I do it? Twitter, what's the point?  Well here's a quick overview...

What is it?

• Twitter is like the status update function on Facebook, but you're limited to 140 characters.  No picures, no wall posts, no applications, just updates.
• Twitter is what SMS used to be when you were restricted to 180 character text messages, except these messages are accessible by anyone on the internet.

Twitter, what's the point?

Aside from the figures mentioned at the beginning of this article, the point is you can use twitter for anything. 

You can follow your favourite celebrities, get immediate news updates, blow your own trumpet, follow experts in your chosen field, winge about work (search for "hate" and "work" and "monday"), maintain realtime search updates on topics that concern you personally or your business........ or anything else that you might want to do.

There's a good article listing 50 ideas on using twitter for business you can read here http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/ but here are a couple of the best picks.

1. Use Twitter Search to keep an eye on what's happening in your space and identify twitter users you might want to follow.
2. Share deep content/services you offer through twitter
3. Tweet about things happening outside of your company that may affect your clients
4. Utilise tweetdeck or twhirl to maximise twitters effectiveness.
5. Utilise tiny urls
6. Twitter breaks news faster then any other resource
   

Prior to setting up your twitter account you should utilise sites such as http://www.tweetscoop.com and http://search.twitter.com to get a feel about what is being discussed around your social networking interests.

How does it work?

1. Sign up for an account and start leaving updates.
2. You can choose the other Twitter user updates you would like to receive by visiting a twitter account page and clicking on "Follow".  The best way to get followers when you begin is to follow users or saved searches in your field.
   

If you're setting up a personal account make your user name something useful, like joe bloggs and have http://www.twitter.com/joebloggs, this is better to send around the http://www.twitter.com/joe39.

Setting up your business account should follow a similar process.  Remember that in both of these cases you are limited to 15 characters for the user name so keep it short.  Something like www.twitter.com/cfdg for the Charity Finance Directors' Group for instance is perfect.

If you are concerned that CFDG may not be recognised as a full profile name let me put your mind at ease, you can specify a longer name in the profile section (and use the full Charity Finance Directors' Group which is associated with www.twitter.com/cfdg).

Now that you've signed up it's time to make your account more human... more social if you will.

For personal accounts a simple head shot as your profile picture will work wonders.  Twitter is all about being social and making the interaction with each other more human.  A nice head shot is a lot better then a picture of baby kitten, unless of course you horribly unattractive in which case a picture of Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie is perfectly acceptable. 

Another important reason to update the profile image is to override the Twitter generic logo.  This is often thought of as the sign of a spam account and is usually not followed by anyone.

Business Accounts will not usually have a single face associated with them, so you should use the logo you prepared at the beginning of this article.  Upload the logo and start updating!

It's probably worth pointing out that these steps should all be done before you begin following people.  If other users see that you haven't completed these steps then the chances of them following your updates are greatly reduced.

You might notice that some people have background images with their site twitter pages as well.  This is important when it comes to Business Accounts as it's a sign of professionalism, and it allows you to promote more of your look and feel and also visually represent the other social media sections of your company (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)  When choosing your background image either keep it the same as Facebook and YouTube, or at least very similar.

YAMMER

Yammer is 'essentially' the same as Twitter, but used within a closed network of users.
Yammer controls who can sign up to see and post updates based on your email domain name. 
What is that?  Well for instance if we started using Yammer at Squiz, you could only join if you have an email address ending with @squiz.co.uk

This makes it difficult to obtain cross country collaboration (@squiz.net.au, @squiz.co.uk, @squiz.co.nz would be all different social networking groups) however Yammer becomes beneficial if you have a security conscious IT or Information Manager as it provides them with the confidence that the information is safe.

But can't I just sign up with joe.bloggs@squiz.co.uk and get access to the network?

No, you cannot.  A confirmation email is sent to joe.bloggs@squiz.co.uk and until you enable the account from that address the account remains inactive.

Remember that Twitter and Yammer are different.  Yammer is about connecting within your Company where as Twitter is about connecting with the World.

YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Youtube has a massive amount of traffic each month, and is often under utilised when it comes to redirecting traffic to your site.

If your company produces television advertising the chances are someone has tried to find the ad via You Tube to either poke fun at it, or to remember some information that was mentioned during the ad.

Either way they're looking for you, and it's your chance to convert another user to your site.

Television Ad’s are only one of YouTube’s uses though, it’s also an excellent way to share your resources with the world.  Some videos you could use include;

• A snippet of a Conference that you have run which provides the user information on how to get the full video from your site,
• A video enabled powerpoint slide presentation on a topic that you are the experts,
• Television advertising,
• A screen captured tutorial to assist your clients to use/navigate your site or use your software
  

It doesn't matter what it is, what matters is that it benefits your clients and will direct them to your site for more information.

Creating your Channel

Visit youtube.com and go to the "Sign Up" link in the top right corner.

Use your social media email address (seriously, this is the third time you've needed to set this up now, get to it!) and fill out the remainder of the information as you have done for the previous networking sites.  As mentioned in the introduction it's important to be consistent with your naming conventions so that your clients get used to always using the same term.

It is important to remember that you CAN NOT change your YOUTUBE channel URL once you have signed up for it.  Twitter can be updated/deleted and facebook can be updated if it's available, but YOUTUBE can NOT.

Once you've set up your channel you can go into My Account - Account Settings and Customise Homepage to add and remove different sections from your video channel.

Next you should go to My Account - My Channel to update the Channel Info & Channel Designs.
Channel Info holds the settings for comments, tags applied to your channel, your channel description and the Title of your channel.  Remember that as with Twitter and Facebook the Title is different to the URL that is used for your pages.

To properly get the look and feel of your channel page you need to ignore the "Select a Theme" options and update the Advance Settings section of the Channel Design section.

This is where the previously organised logo, corporate hex colour list and branding guidelines come in handy.

The last option below Channel Info and Channel design is "Organise Videos" where you can customise the way your videos are displayed.

What's that?  You haven't uploaded any videos yet?  Well, read on.......

Uploading you video

There are some basic rules to follow when uploading your videos as well to ensure you get the maximum exposure.

Categories

Some categories in You Tube are more popular then others, and that means you have a better chance of getting it seen.
So what are the popular categories

• Entertainment
• Sports
• Music
• Comedy
• News & Politics
  

So does this mean that you put all your videos in Entertainment?

No.  You should associate your video with the category appropriate for the video, however if you have a funny entertaining video you are better off putting it in Entertainment then Comedy.

Ratings & Comments

Ratings and comments are a great way to raise the profile of your video and should always be enabled.  It's up to you whether you want only registered users commenting or leave it open to the public, but I say the more comments the better.... leave it open.

I've created them all, what now?

Alright, I think you mean "I've created them all, how do I now get a network of users?"

There are a few individual tips listed in the instructions above, but the rule of thumb is that people will join if you have something to offer them.  Of course the chances of them stumbling across the information is slim, but by following these few suggestions you will see a steady increase in visitors.

• Add links to your email signature (directly under the name/email/website is best)
• Integrate the links onto the Home page of your website as well as at the bottom of each of the information pages or articles
• Add them to your letterhead or any other Corporate branded document you use to provide information to your clients

Good Luck!