Jump start your business social media presence
2009 is shaping up to be the year that social media – for business – goes mainstream. No more is it just the early adopters who “get it.” I remember when my parents got email accounts as being a tipping point for that technology. Today, my dad’s all over social media, and that tells me the ship has sailed, and is going places.
As more and more professionals discover the business benefits of social media, however, there’s a big gap between simply creating a profile – and actually understanding how to successfully engage with people using the technology in a way that ultimately benefits your business. Jump Start Social Media is one possible answer to the problem. The company offers to help busy professionals create profiles on popular social media platforms, something that I’m guessing more than a few Biznik members may be interested in, given that our average age is 41, and virtually all of our members are busy running their own businesses.
We hear a lot of complaints from our members that social networks don’t provide enough information about how to use their service, or tutorials on how to set up their accounts. That’s something that we’re working to address on Biznik, with a series of brief videos that we are currently developing. The nice thing about Jump Start, though, is that they already understand how to use the large social media sites, and they can help you hit the ground running not only by setting your account up and handing you the keys, but they also provide a series of reference guides that cover the basics like:
- How to update your profile with relevant business-related information
- How to configure your account correctly for business purposes
- Best strategies for how to engage with business people to grow your network
I think we’ll see more services like this one as social media continues to move from “that thing that geeks experiment with” and becomes “that thing that everyone does, like having a cell phone.” It’ll be fun to see how services like this evolve, and I hope one day to see Biznik among their list of supported social media.
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:30 pm
You’ve worked on the issue of how to best make Biznik work for it’s members since day one, which might be why there’s less of a perceived need for people to have to have help getting started or using its features. The “How to Network the Biznik Way” events are first class; and the videos are all functional and help to quickly get us going on using the features and leveraging their effects.
The two social media sites mentioned certainly do require assistance in figuring them out. As do others, on a recent trip to visit family I had one of the sixteen year olds set up a MySpace account for me so I could keep track of and interact with nieces, nephews and other family members. While there is always a reasonable learning curve, I’ve now spent way too much time trying to figure out stuff that should be entirely intuitiveand basic – uploading photos.
Maybe it’s because Biznik was developed by an Apple user that it’s assumed you don’t want to have to stumble around the site looking to learn how to do the simplest stuff: it’s usually right there in front of you, and if it isn’t, how-to-do-it steps are intuitive enough to figure out.
Anyway, more businesses in business to help us do business with other businesses whose purpose is to help us do business sounds like busy work turned into necessity by the circumstance of a perception that it’s necessary. There’s a lot of that going on nowadays.
March 4th, 2009 at 7:14 am
Interesting, Dan. Their pricing is certainly affordable! How do we get them to put Biznik.com on their HOME PAGE offerings?
March 4th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
They blogged about us, that’s a start!
March 4th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Yes, and they said nice things too.
March 11th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
I provide marketing and PR services for small businesses and PR, and I’m seeing significant growth in the social media sector. Some clients are social media savvy, but more often than not, folks need “how to” information. They are intimidated by all of the options (Biznik, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.) and don’t know how to choose.
In addition to items mentioned in your post, I think it is important for different types of businesses to recognize how each type of site is different and how they can benefit from them. Some are great for B2B, others are better at B2C and some effectively do both. The key is education and, to some extent, testing the waters to see which tools you are most comfortable with and which are most effective for you. I see this being an area where my business will grow as well.