Social Media Academy with eBusiness Club
Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been attending a Social Media Academy course with the eBusiness Club in Derbyshire. The training is aimed at small and medium businesses looking to improve on their social media strategy. This has been a great course, I’ve never been disappointed by an eBusiness Club course and they have a good range available.
As many of my customers are themselves small businesses I thought I would share some of the key points that I’ve taken away, which are easy to implement without needing someone to explain in detail. If you do have questions please post them at the end and I’ll try and answer them.
Twitter lists
I love Twitter as a learning and marketing tool, but once you are following just a few active users it’s so easy to miss things. The way around this is to organise people into lists, you can then choose which list you want to listen to at that time and just see what has been posted by people in that list. You can have these lists either public or private. What I hadn’t realised is that I can put people or organisations into my list but don’t need to follow them. This means I can easily hear what they’ve got to say but without them being lost in my feed.
Facebook is ‘fluffy cat and puppy’ mode
Facebook is an effective Business to Consumer marketing tool but it is a more relaxed mode than Twitter. If you want to market on Facebook then it’s important to think about the mindset of your followers eg ‘fluffy cat and puppy’ mode. Also for those of us who use it personally (which apparently is half of the UK!) it’s not in a chronological order and you don’t see everything your friends post, apparently it can be as low as 6%. You see more of the type of posts that you interact with so you need to like and share the posts you want to see more of, whether they’re friends posts, fluffy cats and puppies or inspirational. Therefore if you’re using it as a business it may be worth considering paying to advertise to specific groups to guarantee your reach.
Social Media for keeping up to date
Which ever type of social media you use it’s a great way of keeping up to date. You can also use it to follow events or conferences that you can’t attend. For example on the 17th April I shall be at the Dentistry Show and they’re already advertising the hashtag that they will use as #ds15. There are also lots of professional debates and #twitterchat that take place on twitter some of the ones I listen to are organised by @WeNurses. This brings me to my next point.
Professional registers and Social Media
My view is that we should be saying on social media only what we would be happy to say in public, what you put on social media is there forever. Therefore it’s important to also consider the view that your registering body would take of what you post.
The NMC have posted advice for Nurses which you can read here.
The GDC have posted advice for Dentists which you can read here.
The GMC have posted advice for Doctors which you can read here.
Once aware of our professional boundaries we can then make use of the learning and connections that are available through social media. It is a great tool which is why so many of us choose to use it.
There are lots of courses available with the eBusiness club across the East Midlands, take a look at their website to see the current list.
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