Weekly Reading--All About Social Media

Social Media Examiner shared four ways to use Pinterest to make connections and provide value to customers.

1. Tell your company's story. Your history will help establish credibility and build a personal connection with Pinterest followers. It enables you to illustrate how your company is unique and imply a sense of stability and growth. Some ideas on what to pin include: logos that have evolved over time, storefront or website changes, different products or packaging or pictures of the company leadership. You can also feature images of current employees to show who is behind the scenes serving customers today and photos of your team at various events.
2. Recognize customers. Feature images of them using your products or their pins to build loyalty.
3. Make your boards a resource. Link to other websites and blogs to inspire and instruct your customers.
4. Verify pins before you share them. Click on images and only repin them if they go to the original sources of the images.

Wait, Social Media Isn't Free?

Although there is no cost to set up pages and profiles in social media, you can't just "set it and forget it" when it comes to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and other channels. Drew Neisser writes about how it requires constant work and commitment in the following ways:

• Staffing. Internal team members and outside pros are needed to help you take full advantage of social media.
• Monitoring. Free tools work well when you first get started but, when you need global coverage and/or sophisticated reports, you'll need to transition to paid monitoring tools.
• Conversation management. As soon as customer service interactions increase in volume, the free versions of tools become less effective. Instead, you should convert to paid tools with ticketing systems to respond and track interactions across multiple customer touch points.
• Content development. Content that will differentiate you and your company takes time to develop and photos, illustrations and infographics cost money to create. And if you graduate into Facebook apps and YouTube videos, the investment grows.
• Paid media. The reality is that your everyday posts on Facebook will reach only about 16% of your fan base at best. To reach a greater percentage, you'll need to pay Facebook.

The bottom line: despite the investment, social media is still extremely cost-effective for the SMB marketer.