Facebook is the world’s leading social media site. It has more than 300 million users. Facebook is a great tool for businesses because it makes your business discoverable, connected, timely, and insightful. Let me elaborate. Discoverable means that when people search for you on Facebook, they’ll be able to find you. Connected means your customers are able to send your company messages for one-on-one conversations, read your posts and share them with their friends. Timely means that your company is able to reach a large number of people and customers in an efficient manner. This is very helpful during a crisis situation. And insightful means that by having a Facebook, you’re able to track the target market that is interested in your product or business, which is helpful in coming up with marketing strategies.

Now that you are aware of the benefits that Facebook brings your company, here’s the steps to take in order to start a successful Facebook page.

1. Set up your page. It’s as simple as that. Go to Facebook.com and right on that page you are able to set up an account for free. Remember that this page is a representation of your business, so make sure it is professional looking. Your business’ logo should be the Profile Picture, and to humanize your Facebook page add a company employee picture as the Cover Photo.

2. Create an audience. Everyone that works for your company should like you page, and that will start the word of mouth to other customers to like your company’s page. Your employees can also send invitations to their friends to like your company’s page. Other ways to build a following are to put a link on your company’s website, write it in press releases, e-mails, on the company’s product’s packaging to like your page on Facebook. Remember though, it’s not about the number of likes your page gets, it’s more about reaching the company’s loyal customers because they are the one’s that are going to engage with your Facebook the most and help tell your story.

3. Generate compelling content. How will you connect with your now established audience. You want to always have something new on your Facebook page to keep your customer coming back. At first, experiment with various types of posts, such as uploading photos, useful links or relevant articles. Once you figure out what posts are getting the most engagements, replicate them. Do what works and give the audience what they want. You can also build off popular posts to keep the audience engaged. When your followers like, comment or share your company’s post, their other Facebook followers will be able to see those posts in their News Feed. Remember though to keep the information you upload on your Facebook page relevant to your business or product and that it is interesting and valuable to your customers.

https://www.facebook.com/

The above URL link is to the Facebook Homepage, click on it and start setting up your business’ page today! Also, don’t be afraid to use this blog post as one of your first Facebook posts, if it’s relevant.

My last couple of blog posts have been about how to use twitter, so I’ve decided to make this post on what to tweet about once your company has set up an account. You should’ve already made an account with a username that represents your company’s brand name well and is easy for customers to find when searching for you. After that you’re ready to start tweeting and connecting with your customers. So what should you be tweeting about? Here are 5 keys things to remember when tweeting:

1. Businesses should want to make their tweets a two-way conversation, a tweet that their followers can re-tweet or respond to. Use twitter as a customer service tool and respond to tweets that unsatisfied or frustrated customers post. You can do this by having an employee or several employees monitoring people tweets about your business.

2. Link articles that are related to your business for your followers to read. The articles should be of interest to your target audience. This keeps the interest of your followers and keeps them coming back to your Twitter page for more information.

3. Make sure you celebrate your companies accomplishments. This helps your business build a credibility with their followers. Be careful with these types of tweets, though.  No one likes that friend that is constantly only talking about themselves. Keep the celebration to a minimum but definitely let it be known when your company has done good.

4. Promote your favorite charity. Remember that Twitter is a SOCIAL media site. So make sure your company is being just that. When your company has donated their money or time to a local charity, spread that information to your followers. Show them how they can become involved as well. If your business isn’t involved with  charity yet, choose one and help promote with re-tweets and responses.

5. Reward the customers that follow you on twitter. Create Twitter-only promotions or discounts. By giving discounts or other benefits to your Twitter followers, you give them a reason to follow you and could potentially spread the word to other friends. Soon you will have a large, captive audience for other business messaging.

These are just five of the many ways to connect with your followers on Twitter. Use one or use them all, just remember that the number one most important rule for businesses using Twitter is to be tweeting consistently. Your business should be tweeting at least three times a day. Follow me on Twitter @kelseymohn

Hashtags are important for beginner Twitter users to learn because you will find them in just about every tweet you read. Hashtags were created to make it easy for people to find tweets on a specific topic. For example, if you were to search the #Superbowl, you would find a list of tweets related to the Superbowl – which it’s a week later and people are still tweeting about it.

So who starts these hashtags one might wonder. Hashtags can be created and started by any plain jane. For example, when flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River a few years back, a random Twitter user wrote a post and added #flight1549. One of his Twitter followers saw this and wrote a post with #flight1549 added as well, and it escalated from there. Anyone can search #flight1549 and find everything that was written and said about the event.

The most common time or way a hashtag is used is during breaking news (like #OsamasDead in 2011) or to promote or praise a brand, person or event. To find the most trending topics (hashtags), go to your twitter page and on the lower left hand side will be a list. As of right now the top three trending hashtags are #FOMOS, #RHOA and #TheWalkingDeadMarathon.

Hope this helps you understand hashtags a little more and you can start joining in on all the fun. Follow me on Twitter @kelseymohn.

Remember in college when Professors would give you the assignment to read an article and then sum it up slash express your opinion in only 150 words? You had to get creative. Well Twitter is the professor and and your tweets are those 150 word assignments, but instead of 150 words you get 140 characters (one letter or one space equals one character).You have to get creative.

Twitter started out as a social network. It is a way to socialize and communicate with friends. You can use your twitter account to tell your friends what you are doing, share websites you find interesting, post photos you take throughout the day. Here is an example of one of my tweets:

Eggs, almonds, and a 6 pack of cream soda… I'm totally getting a hang of this grocery shopping thing! #biggirl

— kelseymohn (@kelseymohn) September 3, 2012

One of the primary purposes for businesses to create a twitter account, though, is to network online. By embedding links and using hashtags in your tweets it allows businesses, and people trying to promote themselves or a cause, to increase traffic to their website, blog, etc. The re-tweet button allows a business’ special promotions and deals to be seen by millions within a small time frame. Let me elaborate. A business, such as Southwest Airlines, tweets a promotion of a chance to win free round trip tickets to Las Vegas if you simply re-tweet and go to the website (that’s embedded in the tweet) to enter. Then Southwest Airline followers will see this, re-tweet it so all there friends will see it, and those friends that see it will re-tweet so more of their friends will see it and soon enough a million people have seen the promotion and gone to the Southwest Airline’s website. It’s so easy to increase your business or cause’s exposure with Twitter, if used correctly.

Next week I’ll be going further in depth as to what types of promotions your business can use on Twitter and how hashtags work exactly.

Follow me on Twitter, @kelseymohn, to get more examples on how to use twitter.