Do I need to socialize my business on sites such as facebook, twitter, google+, tumblr, pinterest and others?
By Brendan Fitzpatrick
Simple answer, why not? If you have a business and are looking to sell something then what harm can there be in getting your business information out among the masses? Social networks have been around for a while but this particular niche on the internet is one of the most (if not the) fastest paced market when it comes to changes.
Until relatively recently it was very difficult to maintain multiple accounts for various social sites, however – there are several companies that have begun to solve these problems. ‘If This Then That’ (ifttt.com) is a site that allows you to link all of your social networks together and more! I can’t even begin to explain how powerful this site/application is so I don’t want to describe or link to a single article, you should google ‘ifttt’ and read through some of the articles and solutions and then open an account and try to build your own solutions.. you will truly be amazed. Post something to your facebook page and have ifttt post it to Google+, twitter and pinterest! Set the temperature of your house based on the weather, send an email to all of your contacts based on a condition and so much more!
Okay, ifttt has enabled alot of people and businesses to simplify the management of their social accounts which I find fascinating – however, as good as it is – it wasn’t the exact solution for my situation that I was looking to solve. I’m not sure there is a web site that allows someone to create a single post which is then posted to all of your social sites (ifttt can probably do this with some customization but I found some quirks).. However, I found THE best mobile app that accomplishes 100% of what I needed to do. Everypost.com gives you the ability to create a single post on your phone and post it to some of the most popular social sites out there (twitter, google+, facebook, tumblr, pinterest and a few others).
Secret sauce – most people want to increase traffic to their web site, so using the native linking features of facebook and google+ does not let you link a post directly to your web site.. ie. if you use facebook to update your google+ profile, you will simply have a link on your googe+ profile that leads directly back to your facebook page instead of a link to where you really want to send your followers, Everypost solves this problem! You can post any message with any link to all of your accounts in just a few clicks.
My only gripe now is that Everypost is soooo good that I want it to do more. For example, I want to be able to post to multiple business pages, I can get around this by creating multiple logins so not a major issue. I also want the ability to repost older posts, this way if I open a new account somewhere I can simply go back and repost my older content. Finally, one last update that would be great is the ability to edit posts somehow.. typos in a post are no longer impacting a single post – they go across all of my social networks so typos are embarrasing and broken links (typos) can cause more harm than good and manually updating them all .. well, goes against the reason why Everypost exists.
So if the answer to the title of this article wasn’t clear, for most businesses it does make sense to have multiple social networking accounts because tools such as ifttt.com and everypost.com now make it practical. For my website (http://anniversariesbyyear.com) I recently opened a twitter account, google+, pinterest, tumblr and facebook business page and traffic is slowly but surely building up which means higher page views and profits.
I haven’t attempted to go into how to use these social networks, ie. what to post and how often to post, this depends on what your business is about and who your audience is. I will likely post a blog about this topic in the near future.
Any questions or feedback is welcome..