Going Viral

I work for a company that sells baby blankets online, over the last few years my boss put me in charge of social networking for the company.  I knew very little about it and so did she, but being a social person the idea didn’t really put me off.  I signed myself up for facebook and twitter and found my way around them, I had used facebook before so I found that easier to get on with, but twitter was totally new to me. 

I found that it was fairly easy to get going on Facebook; I kind of understood the point and could really engage with fans of the page and also fairly quickly grow the number of people.  Twitter was a completely different story, I didn’t really understand the point and how it works, I did eventually realise that it is easier if you download some software which makes it easier to use.  One of the main issues that many of the customers that buy our baby blankets are not on twitter so it is not a great device for communicating with them, we have found that it is much more useful for communicating with other traders and mummy bloggers. 

Facebook seems to be mainly customers so it is great for letting them know about new colours ranges for our baby blankets and new products and offers.

The greatest learning curve I had on social networking was when I did a campaign to save our local library.  I set up a Facebook page and quickly realised how powerful it could be.  I was able to communicate with huge amounts of people and share photos of the empty shelves when we borrowed every book.  I later found out that Twitter had played a huge part of this and people with hundreds of thousands of followers were retweeting our campaign.  It led to the Press Association selling our story literally all over the world. 

This has given me great insight into how social networking actually works and the best tools to use for the job.  For example, if we are having a sale on our baby blankets, if I post it on Facebook we are likely to get a lot of interest and lots of sales than if I post it on twitter , I might get a few people retweet it , but that’s about it.

If I am posting a link to an article about car seat safety, I am likely to get ignored on Facebook but on twitter if it catches someone’s eye or I actually send it with a link to someone specifically interested in the topic, I can get a chain of retweets.

I have realised that social media is really important for a business; basically if you snooze you lose, but it is important not to get too carried away on it and always have an aim about what you are trying to do.  Ultimately it’s all about selling baby blankets