Top 5 Reasons Why Your EP/Security Business Needs A Social Media Strategy

What is social media?
Social media put plainly and simply is public conversations within established networks. These networks are made up of your friends, peers, colleagues, clients and potential clients. These networks or channels have various names such as Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, LinkedIn etc. Each is unique and useful in varying degrees to executive protection and security businesses.

1. Brand Equity and Monitoring. Social media can and should be thought of as an extension of your brand. In other words you are branding yourself and your company through social media channels. If you don’t define what your brand is, others will define it for you. If you don’t establish your brand, perceptions will be inaccurate – rightly or wrongly. Customers and clients will draw their own conclusions. Think about the impact to your business if you don’t control your own brand! Social media when used effectively shows your credibility to current and potential clients and employers and creates a definition of your business and brand.
2. Word of mouth marketing on steroids. Think of social media as customer cultivation. With social media you are listening to customers’ needs and making sure you create viable solutions.
3. Engage with your customers and clients. By sharing your expertise, knowledge, and experience you establish yourself as a subject matter expert. As a result people will be more willing to use your products and services and trust other businesses you recommend. Use social media to create and maintain a dialogue with your clients. Don’t push ads, instead engage in real personable conversation.
4. Fish where the fish are. Facebook has close to 600 million users who spend over 7 BILLION minutes on Facebook every month! As of January of 2011, 83 percent of the Fortune 500 are using some form of social media.As the saying goes “Pictures are worth a thousand words” – imagine what video could do for your business? YouTube receives millions of views daily. What is significant with YouTube is 70% of its traffic comes from outside the US.
5. Social Search. Social Search is becoming the new norm. By definition a “social search” is a type of web search that takes into account the social graph of the person initiating the search query. In other words think “six degrees of separation.” Here’s an excerpt of an article from Mashable.Com on the significance of social search:
   “In fact, Facebook is more than a social network for many these days. It’s the center of our social graph, it’s where we go to find and read the day’s news, it’s how we comment on articles, and its ubiquitous “like” buttons help us refine our interest graphs and are becoming the de facto way for us to voice our approval for nearly anything on the web.

   “Likes” have become so significant that they factor into Bing’s algorithm for social search results, and even have a place in Blekko’s human curated search engine. “Likes” also determine popularity: the more “likes” a piece of content or status update gets, the more that item is resurfaced inside and outside of Facebook.”