For the next in our series of case studies looking at how small businesses are using social media, we caught up with Natasha Courtenay-Smith, a journalist and founder of press and publicity agency Talk to the Press www.talktothepress.co.uk. She lives in West London, UK, with her partner and one year old son
In no more than 50 words explain what your business is
Talk to the Press is a press and publicity agency. The agency helps ordinary people who wish to sell a real life, or news story to a national newspaper or magazine. We also help those caught up in a media storm handle press attention, securing and brokering them deals for their stories with national newspapers and magazines.
How do you use social media as a business?
We have a blog http://sellmystory.wordpress.com, a twitter page and a You Tube channel. We’ve only started these in the past few months but we’ve found them hugely beneficial.
What are your business/marketing objectives for social media?
Our objectives really are to drive more people to our main website www.talktothepress.co.uk and to give us a greater online presence in the hope that more ordinary people caught up in the news headlines will find our website and approach us for help in handling press attention. We’ve already had people approach us with stories via Twitter.
Do you measure the success of your social media marketing? If so, how?
The blog comes with its own statistics package, and has had over 5000 visits since its launch last October. It gives people a different view of the company – ie, it is more informal and chatty – but as each visit could potentially bring a new story, we now consider it extremely valuable. We update it as often as possible. The blog also ranks really well in Google, for certain terms it even ranks higher than the main website. As far as we’re concerned, as its still bringing traffic to us, that is a good thing.
With Twitter, it’s difficult to measure its success, but we have already had a person approach us with a story which is great. We try to comment on things that are topical to increase people following us. For instance, we tweeted our thoughts and views during Trevor MacDonald’s interview with David Cameron using the hashtag #trevcam which was trending at the time, and a number of people started following us as a result. It’s hard to know exactly where this will end up, but overall, think it is a great marketing tool and an asset.
How does social media fit in with the other marketing your company does?
Our main marketing until recently was Google – both adwords and organic search. Social marketing fits in really well as it brings people to us but via slightly less formal means. It also helps spread brand awareness. What has been great is that I’ve gained opportunities to blog and write articles (and so link build) from seeing tweets on Twitter, and have also been accepted as a ‘PR Expert’ by one website following a tweet I responded too.
Do you have plans to increase your use of social media in 2010?
We have a number of videos on You Tube which we plan to add to, and we will keep twittering and blogging.
What would be your top 3 tips for businesses looking to get involved in social media?
- If you don’t understand it, get a student to set it all up for you! I got a technology savvy internet to set up our blog and twitter, and she presented them to me as ongoing concerns. I fell in love with both and was able to take over the running of them. If it hadn’t been for our intern, neither would be in existence yet I now consider them hugely valuable assets.
- Put a few funny and informal things on your blog. We had some dogs come and visit us in our office (they belonged to the person in the office next door). We took a photo of us with the dogs under our desk. It just presents a more human side to a business and people like to see the ‘real people’ behind the scenes.
- Don’t get too caught up in conversations in Twitter or you’ll waste a lot of time!
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