Social Media in Business. Using Facebook pages, Twitter and Pinterest

Everyone has heard of Facebook. Many people know that Facebook has been coerced, over recent years, to facilitate business usage - which they have - via Facebook pages. A dilemma for many companies, however, is whether to jump on the bandwagon even if it isn't considered to be a useful medium for their business. Here's the optimum answer for those who are undecided: it costs nothing and can take up very little of your time so, why not?

Twitter is a more cosmopolitan mix of business and social interaction. Business people often tweet their own opinions interspersed with corporate data, connecting with a wider audience by adding personality to a faceless company. Love it or hate it, Twitter can be a very useful business tool, akin to the ticker-tape statements that run along the bottom of the screen on Sky Sports. Be there - or miss out on multiple opportunities of promoting your website, products, services, news, etc.

The new kid on the block is Pinterest, barely a couple of years old but already massive across the USA and growing fast. Whereas Twitter is a reading list of 'sound-bytes', Pinterest draws interest visually by letting its users pin pictures to their pin boards - either as an upload or from the internet with a link back to the website where the image is from! Not all companies will find it easy to promote themselves with images but if you have some on your website or blog, these can be pinned. Of course, those alone would be a duplication of your website content and not at all in the spirit of Pinterest (you may be punished) so you need to interact more with potential followers and re-pinners by being generous with your pins and re-pins.

At The BPc, we don't have a lot of interesting products to add to Pinterest as we mainly specialise in SEO, website design and a few graphic design projects. We use Pinterest to help our clients by pinning their interesting images from their websites, blogs or other social media. We add in some complimentary images that we like, too (but not from our clients' major competitors!)

If you feel that promoting your company via social media is a drain on your time or resources, The BPc will undertake to do it for you for a controllable monthly fee. EMAIL
(Linked-In has been ignored in this post because it doesn't address the same general audience. More about that another time.)