Trevor Wood was recently interviewed by Social Small Biz about how we use social media.

Here’s the interview (originally posted here)

Social Small Biz: In no more than 50 words explain what your business is?

Redline Digital Services is an IT consultancy – specialising in Internet services (website design, development & hosting), Internet marketing – particularly the use of social media, data security (backup solutions, secure data destruction, data recovery) and low cost business continuity planning for small businesses.

SSB: How do you use social media as a business?

I mostly use Twitter and to a lesser extent LinkedIn and Facebook. I tweet about everything and anything that is of interest – what I’m doing personally, what Redline is doing, clients that I’m are working for, interesting and/or useful websites I’ve found, etc. I have used Twitter to provide IT technical support – no mean feat with only 140 characters to play with!

SSB: What are your business/marketing objectives for social media?

The main business objective is to raise the profile of myself and Redline, mainly my online backup service. At the moment, this is reactive. When I see something that warrants a mention of our backup service, I tweet about it or reply to it. I’m working on a more focused campaign using tweeted questions pointing to web pages. This will allow me to measure which questions are the most effective along with the best time of day to tweet.

SSB: How does social media fit in with the other marketing your company does?

Social media fits closely with my main form of marketing, which is networking. Over the years I’ve found that this is the most cost effective way of marketing my business. Twitter – in particular – allows me to continue building relationships with people I’ve met networking and start building new relationships with other people – many I later meet face-to-face at a networking event. It does give a bit of a kick start to those meetings as we already know a little bit about each other.

SSB: Do you have plans to increase your use of social media in 2010?

Social media is an important part of my marketing strategy and it’s use will increase over 2010. I’m looking at Google Buzz at the moment although I don’t intend to spread myself too thinly – I believe that three or four networks is plenty. I’m getting known locally as someone who knows how to use social networking for business and I’ve started talking at various meetings on that subject. I’ve been asked to put together a training course on how to use social networking. This will include the technical side of how to set up accounts, what you should put in your profile and how to integrate social networking into the overall business marketing strategy.

SSB: What would be your top 3 tips for businesses looking to get involved in social media?

Top 3 tips – this is difficult to pin down to just 3 but here goes

1. Be transparent. Don’t try to be someone or something you aren’t. Fill in your profile fully, the more relevant information people can find out about you the more they’re likely to be interested in what you have to say.
2. Update regularly. Putting out a couple of updates (tweets, status messages, etc.) and then doing nothing for days or weeks on end isn’t good. People will think you’re not bothered and won’t bother with you
3. Be personal. With very few exceptions, people are interested in people not brands or products.

For more tips see the blog article Social media and business use

SSB: Thanks Trevor!

Filed under: facebook, linkedin, social networking, twitter by admin