The power of social media for your business

I’ve never done that before. There’s a site called www.writetothem.com that gives you all the information you need to contact our esteemed leaders. You can write your email there on the site and it gets sent for you. How good is that.

If you were to overhear me at home lately you would think I was auditioning for 4 Non Blondes the amount of times I yell “What’s going on?” at the TV and radio. They say social media depresses people, but it’s the news that’s leaving me confused lately, and social media is the place I go to find sane people.

One of the best things I have seen on Facebook recently is: “Imagine if trees gave us free wi-fi, we’d all be planting like crazy. It’s a pity they only give us the oxygen we breathe.”

I ran an UK-wide ethical sales course recently and I just love it when the penny drops for organisations and they get excited about how they can benefit from social media, especially when they were previously cynical. Local businesses have been doing pretty well on social media lately, too.

There’s a Facebook group called Lancaster and Morecambe Ladies Mean Business, set up and run by a brilliant net-worker Rachel Holme. With over 260 members already, it provides fantastic business opportunities and we even have a monthly face-to-face networking event – all free. So if you’re a woman running your own business check it out. Then last week Vix and Lou of local business Bough to Beauty, were picked by Jacqueline Gold, of Ann Summers fame, in her weekly twitter event Women on Wednesday #WOW.

She picks three winners a week and tweets them to her 50,000 followers, which provides a seriously big marketing boost for their business. On Sunday evenings Theo Paphitis runs a similar event, Small Business Sunday #SBS. He picks his six favourites and winners are tweeted to half a million followers, listed on his website and invited to meet him and other winners at an annual gathering. We have a few #SBS winners across Lancashire and I live in hope.