I just read “Why Your School’s Social Media Strategy is Falling Behind.” This fabulous article from Fathom SEO discusses social media strategies in higher education. While every university and private school in the country should read this, there are a great many takeaways for small business as well.

When you consider that Facebook has more than 500 million active users, Twitter has 175 million registered users, and every day nearly four years worth of video is uploaded to YouTube, it is quite obvious that you can not ignore the importance or impact of social media. Unfortunately, for many small business and schools, they just haven’t figured out how to make it work for them.

The social media gurus have been saying for a while now that social media is not a “platform to blare your message.” Having the attitude that your organization isn’t going to participate in the conversation because you can’t control what people are going to say, is completely missing the point. I hate to break it to you, but your customers and prospective customers are out there talking about you anyways. Can I tell you how bad it looks when the subject of the conversation isn’t participating…regardless of what is being said?

Social media is the perfect tool for building relationships. People want to do business with companies that they trust. Kids want to go to a school that has a unique personality that they can identify with. Parents want to send their kids to a school where they can participate with what is going on while their child is away from home.

Social media is the perfect way to communicate what is going on in your company, with your products, and with your people. It shares with the world what is happening on your campus, what the sports team accomplished, and what the theater department is producing. This sharing of “micronews” communicates your company or school’s culture with the world. It answers the question, “Do I want to do business with this company?” It also answers, “Do I want to spend four years going to school here?”

Social media gives a voice to an organization. It is the perfect medium to show what a unique personality you have. A printed brochure just doesn’t have the capacity to accomplish that in quite the same way.

One of the best things about social media is that many times, you don’t even need to toot your own horn, your fans will do it for you. Your best customers, your alumni, your current employees, your students…these are the people that bring your social media personality to life. Their comments let others see the real you. If they are truly your fans, they’ll come to your defense if negative comments are made. And if they are, you need to be part of the conversation to react and deal with the problem before it gets out of hand. A great deal is said about how an organization handles problems and negative publicity.

Social media can be a bit more tricky to track the success of. There are the obvious key metrics like number of comments, followers, retweets, likes, etc. In fact, we’ll be looking more at social media metrics in an upcoming review of “Social Media Metrics – How to Measure and Optimize your Marketing Investment.”

With our culture’s interest and activity in social media, you must be a participant. If you aren’t your prospective customer base is going to gravitate to the companies and schools that are active. The place to start is with an examination of your organization, your goals, and what you want to accomplish with social media. You need to involve numerous departments and people within your organization to offer ideas on the best way to get into the conversation.

So what are you waiting for? Start interacting today and let the world know what is special about your company or school.