Businesses and marketers often want to control ALL of their communication, both coming in and going out, largely due to fear surrounding the online world and the potential for negative or damaging communications being made by random… anybodies! However, the thing about social media is that it puts power in the hands of the people – the momentum is often bigger than what a business can control.

Social media is still a new trend and it’s on the rise. Last year, 18% of people worldwide visited social media sites. That figure now stands at 33%*. It’s clearly an important vehicle people are using to gather information and find stuff out. And as a result, it may not always be free!

Early adopters are often winners in these things… it’s a good thing to ride the crest of the wave and lead the way. Why not embrace it and work with it to your advantage rather than try to fight it?

Here are 6 good reasons to embrace the Way of Social Media!

1. What about the good stuff?

To focus only on the potential for negative, possibly damaging interactions with the general public is to completely ignore the other side; the positive/collaborative potential social media offers.

What if people want to post how much they love you? What if you could use social media as a tool to facilitate collaboration or to undertake international partnerships and projects?

What if social media allowed you to have much more meaningful dialogues with your customers – and potential customers – that helped you grow or improve your business, made your customers feel special and wanted and facilitated a deep sense of loyalty and respect for your brand?

2. Social media is good for damage control

Embracing the potential negatives is an important part of any dialogue with the general public. While such interactions occurring in public are risky and may be potentially embarrassing or damaging, it also offers the opportunity for your loyal customers or followers to actively defend your brand for you!

Consider the worst thing that can happen: someone posts a negative or derogatory comment about your company, product or service. If you defend yourself, that’s good. But if your customers defend you, unpaid and unsolicited, that’s invaluable!

Your customers might surprise you; of course, some may agree with the attacker, but what if they violently disagree? What if they can offer useful advice, support or encouragement to a disgruntled customer, help dispel misinformation or head off a potential problem?

One person criticising and 10 people voicing an alternative view equals positive publicity – both because more are for than against and because you’re brave enough to engage in a truly open, constructive dialogue that solves problems and allows people to feel heard and valued, rather than a one-sided, controlled monologue.

If people are going to bad-mouth your business, they’ll do it anyway. At least this way, you get to listen in, monitor what is being said and respond accordingly.

3. Don’t ask people to pull down – push out!

There has been a paradigm shift in terms of how people use online media – and in their expectations. If you’re not ‘plugged in’ to social media and using it to push out to people, then you’re dead in the water. Posting new information to your website is great; people have come to expect dynamic, always changing content on websites. However, by not posting your information on social media channels, you’re expecting people to always come to you.

The new paradigm is that people will actively seek you out – but only so they can easily get information pushed out to them! Don’t expect people to keep coming back to your site to check whether you have something new to say; put it up so that everyone can see you’ve got something new to say – and that there’s more on your site for them. THEN they may be tempted to go and look.

But the crux of the message must be what you put on the social media channels; increasingly people don’t have time to go and look deeper.

4. Social media is GREAT free advertising!

People are coming to you and liking your page because they either interested and want more info, want to support your business or want to be involved in some way. All you have to do is put interesting little titbits out on your channels that make your ‘fans’ feel good and drive people to your website or business; people will not only see it, they can immediately respond / take action.

This is marketing gold; it’s the ultimate in permission marketing! And much cheaper than print media, which effectively does the same thing, only in a much less targeted, hit-and-miss way.

5. Two-way dialogues are critical

You can leverage other people who are providing enormously valuable free promotion to your business by linking with them and actively encouraging/valuing their contribution. Imagine entering a two-way collaborative dialogue along these lines… you actively contribute to their feed and they actively contribute to your feed. Subscribers to both feeds can see each other’s info, and may become interested in ‘liking’ you or being involved in your business. Again, very powerful FREE brand promotion.

6. Not everything viral is bad

If enough people ‘like’ your page or repost your posts, more and more people see your info, hear about you and your business and may be inspired to find out more or be involved. This is the crux of how viral marketing works. And again, it’s FREE brand promotion.

So don’t be scared – be brave! Try it, try it, you may like it! We shall see – could it be?

* Source: Social Commerce Today and Mashable

Some good sites with info to support the pro argument:

• Why Should Your Organization Use Social Media, Collaboration, and Networking?
• The Case for Social Media in Schools
• Fighting the Fear of Social Media