This is Barry mold still getting small business on stock, we're going to talk about why you are stuck around social media. But this is not a video to show you how to use the various social media tools because it doesn't matter what tool you're using. You're still stuck when it comes to your social media strategy in a couple different ways. First of all, some of you even today aren't using social media, because you think it's like that movie, the graduate, where one of the parents friends comes up to Benjamin on his graduation day, and it gives this key word he says plastics, and maybe that's exactly what you think social media is, is just a fad. Well, it's not a fad and no matter who your customers are, you can help your sales and marketing strategy by using social media. You Think that social media is about selling products.

You think it's just like advertising, but it's not. Again, where you're also stuck is that you're talking at people, not with them. You're just constantly sending them messages, and not listening to what they're saying. And in fact, when they do talk back to you, you're talking with the wrong person. And in fact, you are obsessed admit this, you are obsessed with your follower account, and how many likes you are on Facebook, it doesn't matter. It's who you're following, and who you have the conversations with you.

Now, you're also stuck because inside your company, you're really not monitoring what people are saying about you. And if you see a negative comment, you try to delete it, instead of answering it. And most importantly, this extends to the rest of your company, because you do not have a social media policy. Now I'm the first to admit that the World Wide Web can be a world wide web. of time, the smartphone in every consumers hand, every employee's hand really can hurt things. Also, social media really can be addicting.

I love this slide because sometimes we need to go on social media just to fill our adrenaline addiction to find out what's happening, and we're afraid you're gonna miss something. This ultimately does hurt your business. Because think about this to cystic show that 65% of all the streaming content that's watched every day is actually watched during the work day. And in fact, during the work day, 2 billion YouTube videos are watched. They're watching something, and I don't think most of it has to do with business. Remember, as we mentioned previously, social media is just part of the four Ps of marketing that you learned in your marketing classes, product, price, place and of course, social media.

Into promotion. It's no different than advertising or trade shows, or direct mail or email or doing something on your website. However, it's called social media for a reason. Because it must be much more conversational. The goal of social media again is the same that is for all those other promotion things. You've got to be consistent.

You've got to send a consistent message that is out there. People always ask me what tool they should use. And quite honestly, it doesn't matter if you choose Twitter, or Facebook or LinkedIn, or Pinterest or Google Plus, there's lots of them out there. The first thing that you need to determine is where are your customers and your prospects actually having conversations that you can add value to? Where can you get involved in those conversations, so you can get on that like no trust wheel, so you can start to gain some customers that might try from you. So go on one of these, whichever The one you're most comfortable with and do a search and find out.

What kind of conversation are people having? And can you add to that, pick one, and then consistently show up, it is no good. If you just post once a week, many of these conversations on these tools move at a very rapid rate. And typically, on Facebook, you have to post something within 24 hours to reply on Twitter, it's even 15 minutes, post according to a schedule, and then listen to what people are going to say. Remember, you have to engage in a two way conversation. And you have to ensure you're talking to the right people.

That's of critical importance. If you're going to gain a customer or a new prospect, go and search these people's backgrounds or having conversations with you and see if it's worth engaging with them. Now, unlike a lot of other things in this world, like when you watch the movie Godzilla sighs certainly there's not matter the size of your list, while it may feed your ego really is meaningless. Who cares if you have 5000 or 10,000 20,000 Twitter followers, if they're not engaging with you, it doesn't really make a difference. Who cares if you have 1000 likes on your webpage, if they never come back and have conversation with you, who really cares if they don't respond, then social media really isn't working for you. You've got to make sure that you have a company social media policy, because employees are key to activating the message.

Your corporate department just can't do it. But if you have 50 or 100 or 10 employees going on social media, bragging about your products and service has much more of a chance to get spread around and you'd have conversations will attract folks to have more sales with products and services, but you have to make sure whatever employees are posting is consistent with your brand. So you have to have have good balance and good guidelines and tell them what they can post and what they can't post. A way to do this to make it easy is to really use pictures or videos. Every smartphone now has a video camera on it has a still camera on it. And as I stated before, we are living in a visual communication world, people can connect emotionally much more with videos and pictures than they ever can do for any words.

So as we discussed, have customers send in photos of them with your products or services, even have a contest. Encourage your employees to take selfies of themselves working in the office so people can actually see these are real people. This is an authentic company. This will really help your business. Make sure that you respond to comments. I'm not a big believer in automated posts.

While I do believe that when you post the same message multiple times during the day, especially using Twitter, we have to be careful about automated posts and robots. Because let's say for example, there was a crisis and social media is talking about, for example, a plane missing. If you're talking about something totally different, you'll stick out like a sore thumb and it won't seem authentic and personal. Finally, don't always use hashtags. This can really get overused. It's a great way to become part of a conversation.

So for example, I do a lot of stuff with small business, I'm always searching on to see what kinds of conversations are happening around hashtag small business or hashtag customer service, or hashtag entrepreneurs, because then I can become part of appropriate conversations. But every morning when you start your post, you don't need to say hashtag, my first daily post, hashtag excited for my first day, hashtag etc. My first cup of coffee, it kind of gets obnoxious. use hashtags, not to make your stuff stand out, but to become part of conversations. Now your job is to pick the one change that you want to make to get your business unstuck. So your own waste your time around social media, and you use it to get unstuck and move your business forward.

This is Barry moulds getting small businesses unstuck. Have a great day.