So I hear this all the time from people “I don’t think I need a social media presence for my business”. Well guess what – even as you read this article someone somewhere online is talking about your car wash! Let’s face it. More and more people are going online to find information about you and to express their feelings for your business, good or bad.

So how many people are using social media? The numbers are quite staggering. Facebook will have close to a billion users by August of this year. Twitter has over 200 million users. Yelp draws over 50 million people a month. The list goes on and on. Okay, so you realize you need to build a virtual presence. This is often the hard part; do you hire someone to handle the social media side of your business? If not how can you squeeze in the time needed to handle all the updates across all the different venues?

If you are going to do it yourself you should look into a service such as ping.fm. Making an update on Ping.fm pushes (sends) the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social media sites individually. Ping.fm is a free service. If you outgrow something like Ping.fm, you may be interested in a paid site such as Sprout Social. Sites like Sprout Social take what the free sites offer and super-charge it. You can even find hundreds of companies online with a Google search that will manage all of your social media for a monthly fee.

In order to get the most success you need to combine your traditional ways of advertising with social media. For instance, even when you use printed media to advertise, make people go to your Facebook page and like your page to get the deal. However you decide to go about it, I hope you take this call to action and get involved in the social media revolution.

Robert Andre is the President of CarWash College™. Robert can be reached at [email protected]. For more information about CarWash College™ certification programs, visit www.CarWashCollege.com or call the registrar’s office at 1-866-492-7422.