You must start with outlining clear goals for your social
media marketing efforts and figuring out how you will measure success. Once you
have don with outlined your goals, let’s look at 10 great ways you can begin to
leverage social media for your marketing efforts.
1. Facebook:
Facebook offers exceptional, low cost marketing
opportunities for small business. Facebook now has more than 300 million users,
and while that seems like an outrageous number for small businesses to be
targeting, Facebook offers a very powerful platform on which to build a
presence. If you are not already active on Facebook; you should get started get
away.
Basic Strategy:
If you haven’t signup for Facebook yet, you should do it as
soon as possible. Once you have signed up, you should also consider securing
your company’s username. Be aware, however, that if you reserve your company
name for your personal account, you won’t be able to use it for your Business
Fan Page, so you may want to create a page before registering your company’s
name. Fan Pages have special rules regarding usernames.
You should do one thing: search for your competitors and
evaluate their Facebook presence. What types of pages have they built? How many
friends or fans do they have? Spend only 15 minutes (per competitor) looking at
their posts, photos and/or videos to understand how they are using Facebook.
Advance Strategy:
You may have already a personal Facebook account, but how do
you extend that presence for your business? You have several options. You can
register a Business Account – which is designed for a very simple presence on
Facebook. There are many limitations on such accounts, however, so you will
most likely prefer to have a Business Fan Page. A Business Fan Page lets you
create a page where customers or fans of your business can register as a Fan –
expanding the presence of your business. You might also want to consider running
hyper-local ads on Facebook.
2. Twitter:
Twitter has grown tremendously over the past year. For small
business, if offers an incredible marketing platform. Business Week’s recent profile of 20 ways to
businesses use Twitter might give you some ideas about how you can leverage
Twitter for your business.
Basic Strategy:
If you don’t have
signed up on Twitter yet, you should sign up today and reserve an account in
the name of your business. While you might ultimately tweet in your own name,
you will want to have the opinion to tweet from a business account. More
importantly, you don’t want your competitors to register your business name.
Twitter has put together a simple guide to help you to understand what twitter
can do for business.
Next, you should spend 15-30 minutes on Twitter’s home page,
doing basic searches to become familiar with the type of content available on
the service. For example, if you are operating a small gift basket business, do
some searches for various terms and phrases such as “gift basket”, “gifts”,
“gift basket business”, etc. You should also search for the names of
competitors to see whether they are on Twitter and if they are using it. And
don’t forget to search for your small business name – your customer may already
be talking about you. Once you become comfortable with the content that’s
already available and how your competitors are using Twitter, you can being
thinking about a strategy for how you will leverage Twitter for your business.
Advanced Strategy:
To truly leverage Twitter, you will want to learn and use a
few more advanced tools. This includes desktop and mobile Twitter clients like
TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Tweetie. Desktop clients give you more flexibility and
more control over your Twitter strategy than you will have on the Twitter
website. Among other things, you will be able to predefine searches and group
people you follow so that you can minimize the noise and focus on the real
content. You might also consider using a web tool like Twitterfall, which will
allow you to define various custom searches that you can review form time to
time, and also to follow trending topics. For example, I use Twitterfall to
identify helpful graphic design and industrial design resources to share with
crowdSPRING community.
3. Company Blog:
Although there’s more attention focused today on social
networks than on company blogs, blogs continue to offer great value for small
businesses.
Basic Strategy:
At a minimum, you should consider reserving a domain name
for your blog if you don’t already have a custom domain for your business. If
you are comfortable enough to set up you own blog, that’s generally the best
way to proceed, although this requires a bit more technical knowledge.
One easy alternative is to set up a simple blog at
Posterous- a place to post stories, photos, videos, MP3s, and files. There are
pluses and minuses to all of these options- you should take some time to
compare them and do what makes sense for your business. I caution you only
about spreading yourself too thin.
Advanced Strategy:
Now that you have decided to start or improve your small
business blog, how do you build an audience for it? It all starts with great
content. Decide on a focus for your blog, and write awesome content that people
will enjoy. For example, some months ago at my company, we decided that we
wanted to write more about small business issues, so we have been writing
original posts focusing on issues affecting small businesses. Think about your
expertise and more importantly, think about the thing that you are interested
in writing about. A blog requires a long term investment of time and you don’t
want to be stuck writing about things that before you.
You will also want to consider how you can make it easier
for your readers to help promote your content. For example, install helpful
plug-ins, such as Tweet Meme button, which makes it easy for people to re tweet
your posts on Twitter. Don’t afraid to experiments with plugins to add to the
functionality of your blog, but keep it simple. You want to keep the blog
focused, and easy for your readers too.
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