This is a summary from a short presentation I gave this week to the Reigate Business over Breakfast (BoB) networking group:

There are usually two questions that people have whenever they hear Social Media being talked about:

1) Why should I use Social Media?

2) How do you find the time?

Why
If you are looking for a Return on Investment (ROI), one of the biggest ones is that Social Shares increase Search Results. There are many studies on this and it’s something I personally have seen since I started using Social Media in 2008.

Taking a specific BoB example – the Oxshott group members are active on twitter. As a result of this, one of our members is being interviewed on local business radio and we also have interest from a local newspaper.

And it came about through genuine conversations and sharing from the members, at no cost.

Time
Twitter is the number one social network I recommend, as you are limited to the size of a standard text message (120/140 characters) it means that replies and messages are short.

In addition, the short messages make it ideal for managing on your mobile phone – even if you are in an area with a less than ideal mobile signal.

Another benefit of having twitter on your phone is that you can actually manage your account without any impact on your day…

…if you arrive early for a meeting, or are on a train for example, then you can use what may have been lost time to update your twitter account.

Twitter also makes it easy to share pictures you take through your phone, enabling greater engagement while being easy to manage.

Learning the terminology of twitter and how to use the account is very easy, you can even read my free getting started with twitter guide online to make things easy.