Social Sites For Your Company To Be On

photo credit: kazamatsuri

Sometime ago I was writing about why companies should blog and today is time to take it to another level and ponder why companies should promote themselves on social sites.

Basically I want to answer two questions in this article: what do you get out of it? And where to start?

What do you get out of this?

Most importantly you put your brand out there and create a feeling of being agile, fun and well oriented in today’s web cartography. Also this provides additional value as you allow your clients to see more into your company thus strengthening bond between you. For me, when I see for instance photos of a design agency on flickr it just makes me more interested in their work, what projects did they do and I feel that the company has a lovely open door policy. 

Of course, you can just browse the company’s site and gather information but seeing it from the inside from the perspective of a designer or developer holding a camera that is something entirely different. And I love it. 

Where to start?

I think there are three main social sites that you might want to check out in order to promote your brand on:

Twitter - you can either love it or hate it but you can’t ignore it. I am developing a love-hate relationship with Titter for some time now and got to say it is a great way to get to other people and to promote yourself. As a company it is a bit harder to do as you need to put a person behind a tweet but you can substitute by getting the top people in your company to twitt. Examples to check here, here and here.

Flickr - I love browsing flickr looking for photos of design agencies, web designers in their natural environment. In fact this will be something I will do after finishing this post. As mentioned earlier putting photos of your company in public improves your relationship with both your clients and potential new employees (called the “ZOMG-I-Want-To-Work-There” factor). Nothing says better how cool is working on a project in your company than a few shots of people actually having fun doing it. Check out cool examples here and here

Vimeo - a video sharing site (less popular than youtube, way cooler though) Not as easy as flickr or Twitter as toy actually need to upload a video there but sure is fun. Both to watch and to do. Why am I mentioning this particular site? Well, here I have discovered how fun can web development in an agency be. Just check it out by yourself and tell me if this doesn’t scream “we are having fun”.

That’s it. I’m a strong believer that putting your brand on social sites is a good thing and I really hope you enjoyed the examples of where to start.

What about you? Any other social sites you think companies should promote themselves? Or maybe you think it is not an important thing? Care to share?