Two Tiny Ways to Tiptoe Into Social Media

The hardest step for companies looking to engage in social media is the first. Shivering on the edge of the social media high-dive, it’s easy to procrastinate by engaging in overwrought discussions of which platform to use or how often to post, or—the truly asinine—developing editorial guidelines for 140 character long "Tweets."

Start with a puny plunge, off the low-dive. Start using the safest, simplest social media platforms: Flickr and Vimeo.

1. Quickly and without any thought, put your corporate photos on Flickr.

Get your company an account on this awesome photo sharing site, and use it as a repository for your company’s massive, completely unorganized archive of photos from every tradeshow, holiday party and corporate event your staff has attended. Flickr not only lets you easily upload and organize photos into a searchable collection, but it automatically enters into the social space the content you already have lying around. And here’s a tip for advanced swimmers: Have IT or your network administrator drop the available hard code onto your website to create a Flickr "badge" (a stream of shots from your account) that simultaneously show off your culture and social media savvy.

2. Now, immediately encode your videos to Vimeo.

Video is good for your Web strategy—really good. The average site gets something like 2 minutes of a visitor’s time, but a website with video swells to 5 minutes or more. But there’s nothing worse than offering up video in a clunky, incompatible format custom programmed into your site five years ago by an IT goon who doesn’t work there anymore. Vimeo is your answer. This platform has emerged as the hands-down champion of online video hosting because of its ability to encode multiple formats of film on the fly. Vimeo allows you to place them on your site with their clean, contemporary looking player. (Importantly, Vimeo’s videos are optimized for mobile playback even if your website isn’t. It’s a given that people will come to your site from a mobile phone, and if you have Vimeo videos, they’ll have at least one form of content to consume.)

So, you can (and eventually, you should) worry about the quantity of followers across all the usual social media platforms, and the quality of the conversation they’re having around your brand.

But first things first: Take these easy steps to populate your social media presence with existing, branded content. Yes, the real value comes from establishing conversations with customers. But first they need to know who you are!

Luke Meyers handles all aspects of marketing, branding and market research with McMurry, with a special inclination to mobile and new media.  Prior to McMurry, Luke worked in fundraising and development for the Visiting Nurse Service, one of the oldest non-profits in the country.