Social media profiles for your company are now just as much of a Must-Have as a website. While you may not be able to keep up as often as you should, having your profiles in your name is an absolute necessity.
At the very least, you want to own your brand name on every social media site. Especially if you’re a smaller business with a common name.
I’ve had clients before that were local service businesses and across the country there were multiple other companies in the same industry with the same name. They couldn’t get their domain name or any social media profiles with their company’s name.
The sooner you can create your social media profiles, the better. Even if you aren’t going to be updating them on a regular basis, you want to own your brand name so that no one else can take it. In the example I gave it was because other businesses had the same name, but there’s nothing stopping your competition from grabbing a Twitter account and using your company name just so that you can’t get it.
While you may be able to go through some kind of dispute filing with Twitter, is that something you want to be hassled with?
Building back links is an important factor in your website’s search engine rankings. While it may be a small sliver of an impact, having a link on your multiple social media profiles to your website can’t hurt.
Plus, if someone is searching for you and they land on a Twitter page instead of your website, but you aren’t active on Twitter, if your website link is there they will be able to get in touch with you.
There are many social media tools on the web that are free and paid that cover an infinite combination of services. Many of these tools allow you to post from one dashboard onto multiple social profiles.
HootSuite for instance is a great social media tool that allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and other social media profiles. You can type in one box and post to all of them simultaneously or schedule them to go out at different times.
While I don’t encourage cross-posting the same message to all of your social media profiles, if you are really looking to minimize your social media efforts and have little resources, this is a great solution.
Since Hootsuite allows you to post across multiple accounts from one place, you can even copy and paste your message and just change it enough to be more appropriate for the different social media channels.
Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!