Below is a guest post written for this blog, please read, and please share!
The company I work for hasn’t had a social media plan for very long. When Mary Kraft Staffing and HR Solutions hired me as their Marketing Coordinator 3 months ago, most of the staff didn’t even know what Twitter was! Although the younger staff members are Facebook savvy, the professional benefits of the site escaped them and LinkedIn was only being utilized at a low capacity. Being charged with the task of creating a social media plan from scratch was both exciting and daunting, and I’ve learned a lot in a short period of time.
Time for a list. Since there’s a wealth of information about and benefit to utilizing Twitter, I’ll start there.
Convince your sales department that Twitter is their friend.
Our Director of Sales could see LinkedIn’s unique benefits to his team, but not so much when it came to Twitter. This is what I told him:
Did you know that a person’s average attention span is 2.7 seconds? Twitter allows its users to type up to 140 characters for each update. And do you know how long it takes the average person to read 140 characters? You guessed it – 2.7 seconds. Those Twitter folks know what they’re doing!
Every company has a sales department (and if you don’t, I bet you have a person or two who have a sales hat they wear on occasion). It is imperative that you sell your sales department on Twitter! Encourage them to search for clients, follow them, and pay attention to what they’re saying. This will provide you with one more avenue through which to meet your clients’ needs quickly, giving you the upper hand on your competition. Tweet about exciting things that are happening within your company. Try to sneak in details about how accomplished and remarkable your business is without ever actually saying it.
What really sold our Director of Sales on Twitter were the results. One of the companies I’m following Tweeted about a need that we fill for our clients on a daily basis. I passed the information on to one of our account managers, and when she called the company they were absolutely baffled as to how we could’ve possibly identified their need so quickly. The results were not only an increased potential to be able to fill their need this time around – when that company has a need in the future, you can bet Mary Kraft Staffing and HR Solutions will pop into their heads. We presented ourselves as attentive, helpful, knowledgeable and downright awesome without ever having to tell them that we are those things.
Give your company a pretty face.
Before I started Tweeting, I sat down with my boss and asked, what face do we want to put on our company? Social media has a big hand in brand building, which is a large persuader for why a company should utilize it.
Mary Kraft is very active in the community, holding several food and clothing drives annually. We address our clients head-on. By that, I mean we show up at their office, we bring them breakfast, we take them out to lunch. We choose two candidates to designate Employee of the Month and we go to their workplace and bring them flowers, candy, an award, and we display their picture and a few paragraphs about them in our office. This is the face, the brand, that our company has built, and this is what I try to reflect through Twitter. I don’t Tweet about Mary Kraft – at least not directly. I Tweet about what might be interesting to our clients and candidates, about the wonderful candidate we placed, about the event we’re participating in right now (this is the beauty of social media! Every moment is a now moment!), about something silly one of our internal staff said or did (for example, one employee smashing a pie in the face of another employee. That was a great day). Instead of saying Look at us!, this approach lets our followers know that yes, we care, we’re involved, and we want to help, without ever boasting. In the words of HARO’s Peter Shankman, “Don’t make something viral. Make something good, and it’ll go viral.” Write about things that are affecting your market. Think outside of the box.
Be sweet, ReTweet.
Totally stole that from Blockbuster. My bad.
The ReTweet (RT) is a powerful thing. It allows you to get on the good side of the big dogs of Twitter. It gets your company’s name a mention. It builds your credibility. Find updates from those you follow that will be pertinent to your followers and RT them. Pay attention to the updates that your network is RTing and try to provide them with equally interesting and relevant information. Thank someone when they RT one of your statuses! At the absolute least, doing this will make your company’s feed just a smidgeon more likely to appear in Google search results. RTing has tremendous opportunity to boost your value to and dramatically increase the size of your network, allowing you to reach out to more prospective clients.
Along the same thread, participate in Follow Friday as well. Choose a few users from your network to recommend by using #FF. It’ll make them happy, and you’ll reap the rewards. There’s no better way to get someone’s attention than by making them really like you.
About Jessica Knott
Jessica Knott graduated from Towson University in May 2008 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in English, concentrating in Business, Professional and Technical Writing. With experience providing editing and social media support in the IT field, Jessica was offered a position as Marketing Coordinator for Mary Kraft Staffing and HR Solutions in August 2009. Her duties include writing newsletters, press releases and blogs, implementing a social media plan for the company, managing the back-end of the company’s website, researching and attending events, and exploring new avenues through which to promote Mary Kraft’s recently expanded services and support their continuous growth. To contact Jessica or Mary Kraft Staffing and HR Solutions, please use the following information:
1447 York Road, Suite 601
Lutherville, MD 21093
410.296.0655 • jessica@marykraft.com • marykraft.com
Facebook: Fan Page • Group
Twitter: @JessicaKMK • @MaryKraftHROrg
LinkedIn: Jessica Knott • Company Profile
