Using Social Media to Promote Green Energy

DALLAS, TX, April 30, 2012 (Press-News.org) Social media has grown massively in terms of popularity, but how can you use it to help promote green energy? Here are a few tips you can use to get the most out of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and blogging.

Social media outlets involve user participation and/or user-generated content. Popular social media platforms include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google+ and Foursquare, as well as social bookmarking sites like delicious, and social news sites like Digg or Reddit.

Specific social media techniques include creating profiles, blogging, microblogging (also known as tweeting), ratings and reviews, as well as video, photo, podcast and presentation creation and sharing.

Recent research from ComScore says social networking websites reach 82% of global internet users. Facebook now reaches over half of the world's global audience and accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online around the world. In October 2011, Twitter reached one in ten internet users worldwide, having grown nearly 60% in the past year.

Here are a few tips for using social media to promote green energy:
1) Profile creation - Think about what you want to achieve and which channels are best for reaching your target audience. For example, if you're aiming to reach businesses then you may consider LinkedIn and Twitter to be more useful than Facebook.

Ask yourself, what are your objectives for having a presence in social media? A good starting point is to follow companies and brands similar to yours, as well as those that you like. Look at how they use tone of voice to balance being a professional company in an informal medium.

2) Relevant content - Think of what would be of relevance and interest to your target audience, and create and share content with that in mind. By doing this you'll rapidly grow a fan base of valuable likes, followers and subscribers who will share your content to help you expand your reach.

3) Establish your expertise - Online forums and groups enable you to engage in debate and discussion on your subject. Remember, when participating in online discussions your objective is to demonstrate knowledge and expertise, not sell your services. Trying to use social media as a sales channel will quickly lead to you losing likes and followers, and at worst being banned for 'spamming'.

4) Listen and respond - Social media makes it easy for customers to make contact with your company. Rather than using it as a traditional one-way communication tool where you simply broadcast messages, use it to find the advocates. Where possible engage in conversation with them through social media, and observe the conversations they have to understand their needs and interests more.

5) Use hashtags - If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, then the amount of content may seem overwhelming. Individuals and organizations use hashtags as a convenient way to enable people to sort content into relevant subjects. For example, if you search Twitter for #environment or #sustainability then you can find content relevant to these topics. Include relevant hashtags in your tweets as a way to allow people to find your content and start following you to find out more.

6) Promote your social media efforts - It's necessary to promote your social media presence through established channels to ensure success. Add social media buttons to your website and email signatures that encourage people to 'follow' and 'like' you.

You can also benefit from adding 'social share' buttons to your website and blog that easily allows visitors to share that page with their own Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn groups etc.

7) Measure - As social media is a more qualitative than quantitative channel of marketing, measuring results can be challenging. Typical metrics you can measure include followers and likes, the number of visits to your site from social media and how long those visitors stay on your site (tools like bitly and Google Analytics can help with this), which pages people are visiting, retweets of your tweets, comments on your blog, positive and negative mentions of your company or brand within social media, leads and sales acquired, and relationships with clients and prospects.

Stream Energy has expanded its social networking efforts in the recent past to promote green energy initiatives as well as other company products, services and programs. To stay up to date on the latest information, follow us @1StreamEnergy or like us on Facebook.

Since Rob Snyder, Pierre Koshakji and Chris Domhoff secured a Texas retail electric provider license from the Public Utility Commission of Texas in early 2005, privately held Stream Energy (www.streamenergy.net) has become the fastest growing company in American business history. The company expanded into Georgia in 2008 to serve the deregulated natural gas market in that state, and has a combined 400,000 customers in Texas and Georgia. Stream Energy provides a full-service approach to customer relationships, supported by the company's network marketing arm, Ignite (www.igniteinc.com) and a customer-advantageous pricing model.