Entrepreneurs: 3 Reasons to use Status Updates on Facebook and Twitter.

A collaborated post with Max Luster over Google Wave

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(haha just kidding.)

To Early Stage Consumer Service Entrepreneurs:

You’ve just gone through the hardship of building early infrastructure and a quality team to lead the way to your future growth and profitabillity. In the process, you built a service you know your prospective customers would love. The only problem: they don’t know about it!

The cost of starting your company was likely significantly higher than what you initially expected (Who knew that licensing and permits would cost over $5000?). The advertising budget for your grand opening just went from a lavish full color ad in popular newspapers and magazines to a limited campaign on Google Adwords.

Entrepreneurs like yourself are in need of costless forms of promotion that are still effective at attracting your target audiences. Social media is seemingly the key to providing effective communication for little to no money.

The first two social media networks that pop into mind would be Facebook and Twitter. Since the websites draw in around 124 million and 23 million respectively - the amount of outreach for any successful marketing campaign would be monumental.

So keeping potential clients and friends updated to your company’s news comes differently with each of the social networks. Danah Boyd, on her blog, writes about the differences between Facebook status updates and Twitter updates.

Here are 3 reasons to use Facebook statuses and Twitter Updates to better promote your company:

Facebook:

1. Establish Personal Connections

• 2 way connection accept/deny: Facebook is about having a connection with a “friend”, not a “follower”. Boyd writes that Facebook “is about people at a similar level of status interacting”. When @replying a person, you are featured both on your own wall and their wall. You have gone through a selection process of whether or not you want to be their friend.

In this situation, my Status update was on both Max Luster’s and my wall.

This allows for you to mention a person on your Facebook Page. Thank them for writing a good review about your product, for coming to your event, for writing a blog post about your company etc. The mention will be broadcasted to both the people that are Fans on your Facebook Page and also on the user’s wall.

2. Make Your Fans Feel Exclusive

Offering fans exclusive information about your products/services gives them an incentive to stay. Pizza Hut’s Facebook Page isthe perfect example of exclusivity.

Their “Order App” Tab on their Facebook Page allow for Facebook users to order pizza off of Facebook. Offering your customers/fans the ability to do something solely on Facebook also establishes loyalty for your company.

3. Develop Community Around Your Product/Service

The option of keeping comments out in the open allows for open dialogue between not only yourself, but also your fans. Likeminded people are able to connect with each other, and at the same time, you have feedback that you are able to gain from your product/service.

Motorola builds community by allowing their Facebook fans to comment on each other’s wall posts. Getting organic comment from fans is a good way to develop community. Posts should not only be coming from you.

Twitter:

1. Join In On Existing Conversations

• By using twitter tracking services like Tweet Beep your organization will be able to conveniently monitor what people are saying about your product, and your competitors products. By monitoring what general audiences are saying, you’ll be able to write status updates that smartly respond to consumer sentiment. This can create excellent opportunities to offer insight, and establish credibility as a thought leader in your space.

2. Drive Traffic

• One of the simplest, but arguably the most important function of twitter is to promote content that you’ve created and hosted on your website. Letting your customers know that you just added a of content to your page will be  a great way to drive traffic to that content.

3. Crisis Management

• Since updates are limited to 140 characters on twitter, information spreads fast. What happens if your traffic spikes and your server crashes? Without twitter, getting message out as to why issues have occured would travel a lot slower. In crisis situations like that, often times consumers are simply looking for a reason why the content they requested is unavailable - but without that simple status update on Twitter, they may never find out - or find out too late.