Guest blog: Ruth Badger on social media... overcome your phobia now, or you'll be poorer for it

It’s incredible the amount of social media phobia you still find in business. Yes, there are lots of businesses that are embracing social media and using it to successfully to improve their brand and grow their firm, but there are also a huge number of businesses that are completely unengaged.

In my time mentoring businesses, I’ve noticed that there is a real split between people I work with – for every active user of social media, there is another business owner who runs a mile from anything Twitter or Facebook related! What I tell those people, is that in the current economic climate you would be crazy to ignore a free marketing tool. Social media lets you connect with your target audience, communicate what your business does and it can really help with lead generation.

Business owners seem to think that it’s a really time-consuming activity and that they’ll spend half their day writing tweets or updates, when in actual fact, you can get away with around 30 seconds a day once you’re up and running. All you have to do is link your Twitter account to your Facebook page, LinkedIn profile and website and then one update goes to all your communication channels at the same time. Just this morning, I checked the response to a Tweet I sent out a couple of days ago, and I had four good sales leads as a result – it really can be that easy if you use social media in the right way.

First you need to have a good business with a solid brand in place. Then all you need to do is set up your accounts on the social media that suits you best – if you don’t feel confident doing this yourself, you can ask your website builder to do it for you. You can then log in just as you would your personal email account, type an entry and hit send. Ideally you want to update it as much as you can to keep and build followers.

Once you are up and running, I have one golden rule for using social media, which is that you must communicate, not sell. Pushing product non-stop is a waste of time because people become bored and will quickly stop following your updates. You need to mix your comments and try to get your readers/customers to engage with what you’re saying rather than giving them the hard sell. However, you must keep the posts you put up relevant to your business – people don’t want to know what you had for dinner or what you think of the latest blockbuster release.

It’s good to let people know what you and your business are doing, and to try to encourage people to give you feedback. On Twitter you can also retweet useful information that you read elsewhere and other people may retweet your posts if they find them helpful. Social media isn’t difficult to use, it costs next to nothing, and done effectively it can generate sales for your business and give your brand a higher profile – what have you got to lose in trying it?

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