How should my business use social media?

I recently responded to a broad question “how should businesses use social media” in a forum and thought it was worthwhile to repost my brief response here.

As a digital marketing consultant for many business types, I’ve seen a lot of attempts at incorporating social media into the marketing mix.

A common pitfall of “using social media” is that it is “free” and therefore non-specific tactics like “being on facebook” or “having a twitter account” become widespread.

I equate this to having a booth at a conference, but no one staffing it.

In order to effectively “use” social media, businesses need to start with two things, in my experience:

resources to engage with others (most of this time this isn’t your VP of Marketing, who doesn’t have the time to get fully engaged with consumers)
a plan for how to engage with the right people and be relevant to them, while focusing on an underlying business goal.

While this isn’t the only “use of social media”, many companies like RackSpace, a top web host provider, use platforms like Twitter to field customer questions that are both directly asked of them, as well as those taking place without them by using search tools. This level of pro-active customer service (Fanatical Support, as they call it) makes people feel like the company really cares (loyalty) and also nips negativity in the bud (reputation management).