As soon as the site was ready for the general public, I got started with the social media. I’m not really a social media expert, there are people out there who deal with social networking in the business world for a living, but I have enough knowledge to make sure my online businesses get all the basics right.
Before you buy a domain, you may want to consider the other spots where you will be using your business name, most of which will be in social media. The twitter handle tourneytracks was available as well as the facebook url facebook.com/tourneytracks and the gmail address tourneytracks@gmail.com. If any of these had not been available, I might have considered a different domain.
I registered the Gmail address right away and had it forwarded to our primary business address. Gmail is great for this, because logging in to one account can give you all of your email from different businesses and it will reply to whatever email address the email was originally sent to. You can even choose to send form any of the different email address when you compose an email. All this can be done from within Gmail settings, and we find that managing all of our email from Gmail is a great simple solution.
I also registered the twitter handle right away to make sure no one else got it. You don’t have to use it right away, but you should register it as soon as you know your business name. It doesn’t cost anything and only takes a second. I use Tweetdeck to manage various twitter handles, using a different column for each handle.
We couldn’t get the custom facebook url until the site was ready to be seen, because you need 25 likes on a facebook page to get a custom url. You can create as many business pages as you like, but they start with a messy url that you wouldn’t want to post on your site.
Once your site is ready for visitors, you can post on facebook asking all of your friends like the page so that you can get your custom url. As soon as you get 25 “likes”, you can go to facebook.com/username and get your custom url. Make sure you pick the right url, because you won’t be able to change it.
