Not every business that needs reach has the budget or even the capacity to successfully plan and execute chiseled marketing strategies. And while an online marketing team may seem tempting, to most small business, having a dedicated team of social media specialists would be considered overkill. However, social media marketing can indeed be a phenomenal marketing conduit for small businesses and if done properly and maintained right, can be your best marketing guy, ever!
Solution: Be the social media savvy entrepreneur! Here are a few tips that would help you start and maintain your social media profile that will in turn give you an opportunity to leverage the best of the social media platform.
1. Facebook
FB provides an incomparable, low cost marketing environment for small businesses. Facebook offers its users exposure extraordinaire; it has over 300 million viewers and acts as a powerful platform to build one’s presence.
How to maintain: Before you start your own Facebook business page, evaluate your competitors’ Facebook presence: type of pages they have built, the count of friends they have, their posts, photos, and announcements. This will give you an idea as to how to start. Take a look before registering your company’s name with your personal account as doing so would disable you from using the same id for your business fan page. Create a page before your company name registration. If you already have a Facebook account, you can register a business account or simply make a business fan page that’ll expand your presence greatly. Advisable is also to run hyper-local ads.
2. Twitter
Twitter is a rich source of instant information that connects people from across the world on a single platform and helps you reach to your target audience in a jiffy.
How to maintain: Apart from regular tweets, searching what’s happening near your city and writing tweets relevant to it will give you more visibility. See your competitor’s tweets and if you need to respond to them; this is your chance to network. Include a desktop and mobile tweeter client to your plate of social media marketing list. These clients let you predefine searches with a particular set of keywords and also let you group people you follow, minimizing the noise.
Keep TwitterFall handy, a web-tool that allows you to define custom searches that you can review. Last but not the least, follow trending topics and tweet mentioning your business in it.
3. LinkedIn
A social networking platform, made chiefly for professionals all over the world, there wouldn’t be a better place to connect and network than Linked In.
How to maintain
Reserve your business name or your name with the description of the business you are into and look around for people in your verticals that you may know or you wish to. You can find a group of people who has a connection with your business or your vertical and add them to your profile. As a small business, the Linked In feature “recommendation” is a real good idea; you can ask your customers to recommend you in your Linked In page that can be viewed by everyone.
4. Blogs
Blogs are not just a platform but an essential marketing tool that lets an individual or a business be in direct touch with their customers.
How to maintain
Start a blog with your company name, maintaining brand name consistency to that of your other social networking sites. Search for companies in your verticals who are on blogs and connect with them, comment on their posts and leave your blogs URL in the comment. You can also register a gravatar with the picture of your company and use the gravatar information and image in all your social networking arenas; wherever it can pull a gravatar directly. It is vital for a company to be get identified by its users with a single logo or image.
Get the best of your social media platform; the handy tips are right here for you to take your business soaring.
This article has been written by Dhruv Kapoor from Offshore Ally. Dhruv is a part of the company’s talented workforce of virtual assistants and link builders. Dhruv has a thing for gadgets and Internet marketing. Connect with him via Twitter.
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This post was written by...
mitz – who has written 197 posts on Lets Build Websites.
I am addicted to internet marketing and making money online. Who wouldn't want to live that life? I started out with one website as a hobby and now have over 20. Building websites and making money online is not that hard. You have to actually take action to make money...that is the biggest hurdle! :)
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
We’re so lucky that there are social media nowadays! it’s free and quite useful, but I think it isn’t enough, so I may have to put up my own site for my biz.
I need to maximize the use of these free sites.
Thanks for the article.
– Don’t have idea about LinkedIn, gonna check them later.
I personally would love to just socialize as opposed to make money…you Coffee & a cig. Seriously great insight for good things to come I hope. Thanks for the article “D”
Bryan Ring recently posted..Best WordPress Website
The easiest way to earn nowadays is through social media. Because almost all the people in the world use social media sites. Anyone that knows how to use the internet has an account in ay social media, like facebook, twitter, and more. Anyway thank you for all this tips. It is really a great help.
One thing I truly love about marketing through social media is that you get paid to socialize. Granted, it may not be your daily preferred topic for casual conversation, but the ability to be able to converse about subjects connected to your business is a real perk.
With time and effort, you can buy a domain, and have your Wordpress blog hosted http://smallbusiness-domain.com/coupons/netfirms , then take off blogging and chatting and socializing – with a focus – and actually have a job you can enjoy. Not too shabby.
I never would have imagined, years ago, that the world would feel so small. I remember it being a very big deal to have penpals all over the world, and at one point, I was keeping up with 30 penpals from all over the globe. I do miss the the paper and pen and an envelope to hold, but the ability to converse with people in real time from many different places and cultures is a nice trade-off, for certain. Once in a while, it is financially beneficial as well.
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Maintaining social media accounts involve a lot of effort. You have to create a strategy in order to attract people to like your page. For instance in Twitter, you have to write an eye catcher title so that users will follow and click on your link. Perhaps hiring a writer is best if your really not good in writing.
Hmmm interesting, Discount watches…. Nice comment haha.
I start to feel old (I’m 25), I know all this social media is free advertisement but I just can’t be bothered.
I don’t like how social-media is making us less social in real life. I do have Facebook, but luckily I’m not addicted to it.
Are the benefits really worth it?
(ps. I am on the internet most times from China, so I can’t even reach fb twitter and yt in a normal way)
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The time factor for maintaining all these social media platforms is what gets me. I know it is something I should be in, but it is hard to make the time to do it despite knowing that if done well it can be the key to success. Also it used to be there was a “keep your privacy intact never give personal information on the internet” mentality that has been shattered with the popularity of social sites – I guess I’m still stuck in the privacy mode.
Chris recently posted..Women’s Invicta Watches
Your right Chris!
Privacy has absolutely gone out the door! Everyone is so open with their business and personal life online..it is crazy and I am wondering how far it will go.
It has to be a error in my feed demon reader… your feed is valid:http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FWordpressWB
Bjorn recently posted..link building strategy using dofollow blogs
Hey I did find a problem with the feed when I went to add it to a sidebar on another blog…The links are ok but the details are scrambled… Will have to check it out…
Thanks for telling me!!
mitz recently posted..Search Engine Optimization SEO Explained for New WordPress Website Builders
Nice read, I think a few companies are rushing into social in the same way they rushed onto the web, “we need social media promotions” in the same way businesses used to need a website as “everyone else has one”.
The above approach never works and as you point out having a social media expert in many industries is overkill but consulting one before making your first move is definitely not!
Its easier to do good social for a product that has human interest than it is for a boring product/government department, the trick is planting the right seed.
Lisa recently posted..The sound of tinnitus
So true Lisa!
But one thing I do notice is that those boring government groups and even “dentists” as Al said above, are changing to suit the social way. They are trying to make things fun and sometimes it is really working…
I do not think that social media is for all small business though…
mitz recently posted..5 Tips to Reduce your Bounce Rate on Google Analytics
I would agree with that but its not for all large businesses either. I used to work for a sme that sold workplace products such as lifting and handling equipment. Having a “safe lifting blog” was one way of getting social but the reality is that there was no interest outside of work and people would never view this as something they would choose to look at for themselves in free time, more like something that the HAD to understand at work. While there is scope here I think for you to truly “go social” people need a real interest….. for example a company selling bike racks and bike parking can take the fitness angle/cycle to work/make sure your employees can park their bikes to engage the people using the bikes and the companies who would need to provide parking equipment
Lisa recently posted..Lies and truths about tinnitus
In the past, our dental practice has been concerned with the perception that social media might make our practice look cheap (à la cheesy lawyer television commercial). What we found was that Facebook, in particular was a great media for “letting our hair down” a little while connecting with our patients and perspective patients.
Within days of posting a fun staff team building photo (where the dentists were dressed as frontiersmen and the hygienists like saloon girls) we immediately got inquiries. “This really looks like a fun office, do you recommend them?” one of our patients was asked after she “liked” our photo.
It seems to be working and our staff loves it.
Hi Al
Small business is so lucky now as they have all this free advertising!!! They just do not know how to use it yet!
I sometimes build websites for community groups in my town and I setup the social networking scene for them and the whole group comes alive!
People get to see what they are doing when they otherwise wouldn’t have a clue.
mitz recently posted..SEO Keyword Research Tips and Tricks
For me, Twitter and blogging is the best way to promote a small business online. with the right audience and consistency in maintenance, a small company can grow very quickly through social channels and content generation.
Maintaining social media profiles can be time consuming, and a tip to have some basic automatic updates is to include a RSS feed or more. You can use services like dlvr and include a feed from your blog or other social profiles you have… speaking of feeds, I recommend the webmaster of this site to look at the feed, because it is corrupt in my feed reader right now.
Bjorn recently posted..How to maximize the link building value
Thanks for the tips Bjorn
I really need to take better care of my feeds and get them out there more!
Never heard of dlvr but will check it out… I have used Twitterfeed though…
I can’t see a problem with feed..Can you tell me the details?
mitz recently posted..6 Tips To Improve Google AdSense Click Through Rate CTR
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