One of my favorite sites, GigaOm, posted an article yesterday “4 Social Media Marketing Tips That Work.” It prompted me to start thinking about how we use social media here at VPS.NET, and what benefits we see from it. There’s certainly no question that our use of social media, especially Twitter, has helped our company grow. We’ve landed clients, we’ve learned a lot about our downfalls, and we’ve built some very strong relationships with clients and vendors.

Transparency
The first thing I’ve noticed about social media is it forces you to be transparent with your actions. Both your good side and your bad side are shown to the public; if you handle the bad right, it’s overlooked. If you handle it wrong, it can ruin you. What can you do to avoid handling it wrong? Being human. Acknowledge the problem, explain how you’re going to fix it, and then put that plan into place.

Being Human
When we use Twitter, our goal isn’t to just send PR notifications; we want to be human. We want to engage the community, replying to fun tweets, retweeting stuff we find interesting, and interacting with our customers. It gives us the ability to truly know our client as a person, and it gives our clients the ability to know us as a person. It makes our relationship much more enjoyable and it removes the traditional vendor/client relationship, which is oh so boring.

Being Authentic
I mentioned earlier about having a plan and actually putting it into place. There’s nothing that I, as a client, hate more than false promises. When we put something out on our Twitter it becomes our mission to accomplish it. We know that if we promise something and it doesn’t come through, we lose our legitimacy as not only a vendor, but also a person, and that makes the importance of delivering on our promise so much more important.

What can we do better?
As we grow, I feel we need to continue to improve on our ability to know you. We not only need to make our Twitter name more well known. If you don’t know of our Twitter, it makes it hard for us to know you. Not only that, but there are many other social media applications, Facebook is one that comes to mind, that we don’t use to the full extent. Not everyone is on Twitter, and we shouldn’t force you to signup for Twitter. We need to come to you.

We also need to have more fun with social media applications. It gives us, and the VPS.NET brand personality. Now I don’t mean a joke of the day, but we need to engage the community better. Whether it be discussion questions, input on VPS.NET, or even social media specific promotions, we need to give you additional value for bringing you into our social media network.

Feel free to discuss your thoughts on social media. From what I’ve found, it’s really changed the way a lot of businesses operate, and I hope that we can continue to innovate the vendor/client relationship, and add value to our hosting services.

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