I have recently launched our page (The Old Station Nursery Group) on Facebook and will be using it to communicate with our customers and to suggest a few value-added extras. Maybe some offers, the occasional voucher, or advance information about new initiatives - anything, really, that helps us communicate with them and makes them feel more involved with the nurseries. For example, we are just about to roll out a direct debit scheme for our parents - something that has been surprisingly difficult to put in place - and I will be using Facebook to share the process with them and offer an incentive for early subscribers.
Twitter is proving a useful tool; something that started as a bit of a gimmick among celebrities and their fans - most notably Stephen Fry, who got stuck in a lift and tweeted to his followers, resulting in a quick release - is now mostly used by businesspeople and can be very powerful.
If you haven't dipped your toe in the Twitter pond yet, do have a look. You can sign up easily at www.twitter.com and can build your own profile in a few minutes and choose whom you wish to follow. More and more people have a Twitter ID on their website or e-mail footer (I'm nurserysarah), and you can choose to target a sector to keep up to speed with developments. There are some great tweeters from the early years sector and I enjoy brief exchanges with several of them - it has to be brief at only 140 characters per tweet, so no room for waffle.
Twitter can be really useful if you need help, whether you are after a professional recommendation, have a challenging question or are simply stuck and need to ask a wider audience. It takes time to build up a group of followers, but once you are registered you can look at anyone's tweets. It can be addictive, so be clear what you are looking to gain from it.
It is easy for a website designer to add a blog facility to your website, but you must take time to update it regularly. Apart from communicating with your customers, blogs are a good way of improving the visibility of your website to internet search engines. They encourage your customers to interact with you, too - although you have to accept that feedback isn't always positive. Mind you, most people find a site far more believable if there is the odd grumble among the positive comments. Also, while none of us likes complaints, they are a good opportunity to show that you take customer feedback seriously and are willing to address a perceived problem.
If this all sounds like Double Dutch to you, talk to some of your younger members of staff; they might be just the people to advise you on a social media strategy. You may well have someone on your team who would be happy to tweet or blog for you, or manage your Facebook page - within certain parameters set by your management team. So, go on, if you haven't yet - give it a try.
