Social media for business is still a process that is molding and changing but no doubt about it every single business needs a social media presence regardless of what they do. But has social media slowly changed into a business beast? Of course many businesses are there to build their business but, when is too much business going to hurt your brand in the social communities?
Social media developed and spawned in order to allow people to be able to communicate online with other like minded people but somewhere along the way a light bulb went off over the heads and business minded people and entrepreneurs across the globe. Facebook did it right when they invoked very strict rules in place surrounding the idea of people trying to launch business accounts around a personal profile. Facebook realized that there is an importance of offering a business model to a social networking tool. It just has to be done tastefully and it has to be done right so they launched a separate section for businesses to market themselves. If Facebook allowed for businesses to launch personal profiles, their website would have deteriorated very quickly and the quality of facebook would not have been preserved for the long term.
Social media and business go hand in hand but it is important for businesses to realize that there is an approach that is highly appreciated and there are many approaches that are very frowned upon. A Twitter feed should not be used solely for the sake of throwing out your products every day in the social stream. There is a reason why they call it a “community” and it has to be approached like a community. Pretend you are at a dinner party and you speak with someone to let them know what you do for work, soon thereafter you might speak about something else occurring in your industry or in general. This is very similar to how a business should approach the online communities. You want to let people know you are a business and you have products or services but you also want to let them know that you are there to participate in whatever the goal of that technology might be.
