Social Media and Business: An Awareness and Engagement Tool

Social media offers businesses an opportunity to engage directly with customers in a cost-effective way. Businesses can now advertise their products or services on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other smaller social media platforms. For many companies, however, they don’t know where to begin, or how to use each platform effectively. As much as social media can work in a company’s favour, if used incorrectly it can work against you. There’s a lot to learn, and luckily there’s Canadian government funding for training available, such as the Canada-Ontario Job Grant, to help businesses teach employees on how to use social media for business. In this post we offer some tips and advice for using the three most popular social media networks that businesses use: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

What and When to Post – Social Media Basics

Having engaging content is the key to using social media for business. You can post links to your blogs, promotions, and registration links for events. In order to know what to post you have to understand your audience and the forum you’re posting on. The first consideration is post length. On Twitter, for example, you’re limited to 140 characters – this largely determines what type of content you can post. Twitter should be reserved for short posts (that fit within the length requirement). Longer posts should be reserved for Facebook and LinkedIn where there are fewer restrictions on post length. Often times, posts include a link to a webpage with more information on the topic and the social media text acts as a summary or teaser to that webpage content.

A second consideration is the type of content that you’re posting and the language you’re using. As a general recommendation, consider how you use each of these social media platforms for your own purposes – Twitter is for quick news that you can scroll and click on stories you’re interested in, Facebook is for catching up with friends and reading trending stories, and LinkedIn is for business communication and professional networking. Keep this in mind to help guide your posting strategy – Twitter should be fairly casual, Facebook allows you to get into a bit more depth but keep it fairly concise, and LinkedIn should be reserved for professional topics. Your posts should be tailored for each forum to give you the best chance for positive impact.

Social Media Automation & Team Training

Social media doesn’t need to take up all of your time. Your marketing team can benefit from a myriad of tools and software to help automate and optimize your social media campaigns. Most platforms have their own built in tools to help you measure your impact, such as Twitter Analytics, but you can also use any number of software systems – from a free scheduling tool to a full social media marketing automation tool.

Many companies don’t have the internal expertise or capacity to manage social media, let alone learn another software system. There are, however, options to get training from many third party trainers on social media marketing, and software training to help improve your team’s skills, increase your marketing ROI, and engage with your customers.

Funding for Marketing Training

Mentor Works has helped numerous companies discover funding to help offset the costs of training. This helps a business stretch their training dollars while providing employees with a new skill set. Training grants, such as the Canada-Ontario Job Grant can be used to cover up to 66% (to a maximum $10,000 per employee) of third party training costs. If you are interested in learning more about training funding, you can register for one of our upcoming training webinars to learn more about training funding opportunities. Want to follow us over social media? Connect with Mentor Works on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.