By Chris Barling

In the last few years social media has taken off like a turbo-charged rocket ship, and many forward-looking businesses are examining the opportunity that this might present. Facebook has hundreds of millions of active users, and contrary to some expectations Twitter has continued its exponential growth, with well over 100 million users, and over 60 million tweets per day. YouTube tells a similar story, continuing to grow users and usage. It’s all been quite extraordinary.

Social networks have a huge advantage which explains their success: they are based on conversations between humans, which comes naturally to all of us. This is good on a personal level, but is a challenge when it comes to marketing, as you must be both interesting and interactive to succeed.

Bearing all of this in mind, here are some tips on things not to do:

1 Don’t be too ambitious

You may well have heard stories of a young group that shot a video in their front room, uploaded it to YouTube, tweeted the link and received several million views. One ad agency invented a girl with a Facebook diary that was a huge sensation, leading to fantastic publicity for a modest outlay.

You might reproduce this kind of success with something that truly goes viral, but you are better off shooting for a more modest target. It’s impossibly difficult to shine among millions of others and very little gets passed on to friends. Looking for enormous success is a million to one shot, with the likelihood of failure.

2 Don’t use the foot in the door sales method

Social networking involves people communicating with other people. It’s easy to build a reputation for crass promotion. Bare knuckle marketing will not work on social networks. Anything that looks like blatant advertising is highly counter-cultural and will be ignored or even worse, ridiculed. The problem is then whenever anyone searches on your brand, they will discover a torrent of abuse criticising you and your company.

3 Don’t miss the advertising opportunity

Consumers are able to use social networks for free, but the networks aren’t charities and are highly motivated by revenue opportunities. As a result, the most likely method to produce great results from social networks is to advertise with them.

Facebook advertising has built on the successful Google model and allows either pay-per-click or pay-per-impression. As well as deciding the amount to bid, the advertiser can select on factors such as education, relationship status, location, age, sex and interests, so you can target your demographic very accurately.

4 Don’t let your customers tweet in vain

Although our tendency as business people will be to see social networks as a marketing channel, limiting ourselves to this perception is a mistake. It’s important to check what’s being said about your company on the major networks. This enables you to pick up service issues both before they are blasted out at top volume and before they develop into a larger problem. Actually, using networks as an early warning system for problems can be a big positive.

5 Don’t let your effort exceed the business benefit

There is a lot of rubbish talked about social networking. It’s a hot topic so the consultants are all bigging it up to boost their fees. Getting involved isn’t principally about being on the cutting edge. It only makes business sense when you can turn a profit. So make sure it’s subject to a cost / benefit analysis like any other business activity.

Opportunity knocks

Social networks are taking more and more of consumer’s time, but must be approached in a new way. Out goes one way communication and in comes interaction, with much more power on the consumer’s side. As with everything new, it’s a great chance to put one over the competition. Maybe some gold can be dug out of the amazing growth figures for social networks after all.

About the author

Chris Barling is Chief Executive Officer, co-founded ecommerce and EPOS solutions vendor at Actinic. He has some 30 years experience in the IT industry. He is a prolific writer of articles and blogs for a large range of small business media.

About the company

Actinic helps small retailers trade via multiple channels - internet, mail-order, telephone-order (MOTO) and in-store - with its ecommerce and electronic point of sale (EPOS) systems. Actinic products combine ease of use, flexibility and affordability with all the features needed to build and manage successful online and offline businesses.

www.actinic.co.uk