1. Facebook
Facebook
offers exceptional, low cost marketing opportunities for small business.
Facebook now has over 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’re not
already active on Facebook; you should get started right away.
Basic Strategy: If you haven’t signed up for
Facebook
yet, you absolutely should as soon as possible. Once you’ve 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 (more on
those in the Advanced Strategy), so you may want to create a Page
before registering your company’s name. Fan Pages have special rules
regarding usernames, which you can read
here.
You should do one other thing: search for your competitors and
evaluate their Facebook presence. What types of Pages have they built?
How many fans or “friends” do they have? Spend 15 minutes (per
competitor) looking at their posts, photos and/or videos to understand
how they’re using Facebook.
Advanced Strategy: You may already have 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 (read the
FAQ here), however, so you’ll 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 (because
your updates will also flow to their pages). You might also want to
consider running hyper-local ads on Facebook.
2. Twitter
Twitter has
grown tremendously over the past year. For some small businesses, it
offers an incredible marketing platform. BusinessWeek’s recent profile
of
20 ways businesses use Twitter might give you some ideas about how you can leverage Twitter for your business.
Basic Strategy: If you haven’t 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’ll
want to have the option 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 understand what Twitter can do for business. You can also check out Mashable’s
Twitter Guide.
Next, you should spend 15-30 minutes on Twitter’s homepage, 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 your competitors to see whether they’re on Twitter and
if they are, how they’re using it. And don’t forget to search for your
small business name – your customers 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 begin thinking about
a strategy for how you’ll leverage Twitter for your business.
Advanced Strategy: To truly leverage Twitter, you’ll
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’ll have on the Twitter website. Among other
things, you’ll be able to pre-define searches (so that you can monitor
certain keywords, including your business name) 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 (and color-code) various custom searches
that you can review from 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 the 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’re comfortable enough to set up
your own blog, that’s generally the best way to proceed – although this
requires a bit more technical knowledge (many hosting providers offer a 1
step easy setup for blogs that will automatically install WordPress for
you). You can also setup a blog directly at
WordPress.com (it’s easier to do, but you don’t have full control over everything that you would on your own site).
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’ve 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’ve been writing original posts focusing on
issues affecting small businesses. Think about your expertise and more
importantly, think about the things that you’re interested in writing
about. A blog requires a long term investment of time (and resources),
and you don’t want to be stuck writing about things that bore you.
You’ll 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 a
TweetMeme
button, which makes it easy for people to retweet your posts on
Twitter. Don’t be afraid to experiment 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 to use.
4. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business oriented social network for professionals, and it’s huge, with nearly 50 million users from over 200 countries.
Basic Strategy: Once again, you’ll want to at least
reserve your business name (or your personal name) so that others can’t
use it. Similar to the way you might start exploring Facebook and
Twitter, you should look around on
LinkedIn to see how your competitors are using the service. You might also look up your customers and connect with them.
Advanced Strategy: LinkedIn has some powerful
features that most people don’t use. For example, you can encourage your
customers, clients or vendors to give you a “recommendation” on your
profile. Recommendations are useful because they’ll make you and your
business more credible with new customers. If you’re a roofer, for
example, ask your customers to recommend you after a successful job.
You’ll find such recommendations useful – particularly since your
LinkedIn profile will come up high in search engine results. I recommend
that you read Chris Brogan’s post from last year discussing the
elements of a good LinkedIn recommendation.
Another strategy involves the many subject matter groups on LinkedIn.
Find some groups that have a connection to your small business and
become involved in the conversations. Answer questions when you can, and
help to establish yourself as knowledgeable about specific topics
related to your business. There are many small business and general
marketing groups that will be very useful resources for you, and if
there isn’t a group that interests you, consider starting one.
5. Participate On Other Blogs
It might seem counter-intuitive for you to spend your valuable time
by participating in discussions on other people’s blogs, but the payoff
can be very valuable. Remember that it takes time to build a reputation
and establish your credibility, and you can’t always expect everyone to
come to you. Sometimes, you have to go out and build your own
credibility and reputation.
Basic Strategy: Identify 2-3 blogs in your industry,
or those that focus on small business, and get into the habit of
regularly reading the content and participating in the discussions.
Whenever you can, try to add value by sharing a personal story about
what has/has not worked for you. Get to know the writers – they’ll be
valuable contacts for you. One strategy for identifying good blogs is to
use Guy Kawasaki’s
Alltop,
which is a directory of popular blogs across many different subject
areas. For example, for blogs focused on crafts, you might follow
this page on Alltop. If you want to participate in blogs focusing on small business issues, you might start at Technorati’s list of the
Top 100 Small Business blogs.
Advanced Strategy: Once you’ve spent some time on
other blogs and have participated in discussions, you’ll find that
you’ve built a level of credibility and trust, based on your
participation. You should consider reaching out to the blog owners and
asking whether they’d allow you to guest post an article on their blog
(kind of like this post). This is a nice way for you to get in front of a
bigger audience, and many blog owners will invite guests to post from
time to time. Agree on a topic in advance and provide a draft of your
post sufficiently in advance of the publication date to give them an
opportunity to review.
Alternatively, ask if they would consider guest posting on
your
blog. Since you’re looking to attract more readers (and more potential
customers), either option works well for that purpose. Don’t worry so
much about going after the A-list blogs right away. There are many
excellent blogs and it might take a bit of time to build your reputation
to such a level that you’ll have opportunities to post in the top
blogs. That doesn’t mean you should wait, though – make opportunities
for yourself and offer to guest write whenever you can find a new
audience. I recommend you read
How To Guest Post To Promote Your Blog from blogging expert Darren Rowse.
6. Mobile Social Networks and other Local Strategies
Yelp publishes millions of reviews about local businesses.
Foursquare
is a combination city-guide, friend finder and competitive game. It
allows users to “check in” by cell phone at a local venue and announce
this via other social networks such as Twitter.
Basic Strategy: Yelp, Foursquare, and other mobile
social networks can be powerful marketing channels for small businesses.
You should at the very least register accounts on the popular services
and get to know them. If you have a restaurant or a retail store, for
example, you’ll want to get to know Yelp pretty well. You can set up a
business account on Yelp (no cost), which will let you answer questions
about your business, track how many Yelp users view your business page,
add information about your business, and announce special promotions.
Similarly, you’ll want to sign up with Foursquare to take advantage of
local advertising opportunities. Using Foursquare, you’ll be able to
push promotions to potential customers who’re in the vicinity of your
business.
You should also consider other local strategies. For example, you can
add your business to Google Maps, or update your listing to include additional details. You can do the
same on Bing.
Advanced Strategy: If you believe that your business
can truly benefit from a presence on Yelp, Foursquare, or similar
networks, you’ll want to do more than just register accounts with those
services. For example, Yelp allows you to include a website URL for your
business. Nearly all sites will let you upload photos to your profile,
and photos will make your profile more trustworthy.
You can also proactively use Yelp and other similar services to
promote your business. Ask your customers, friends and family who have
used your services for a review on Yelp. You can encourage reviews by
running promotions or discounts – offering free appetizers, for example,
to a customer who will write a review about their meal at your
restaurant (or to one who already wrote a review), or a small discount
to a customer who hires you for carpentry work and mentions that they
found you through Yelp.
Similarly, you can find ways to promote your business using
Foursquare and similar networks. If you have a TV display in your store
connected to a computer, you can display the people who are checking in.
You can offer specials or discounts to the person who visits your
location the most (this is similar to frequent buyer cards that many
businesses have used for years).
Don’t forget to also consider how you can improve your use of other
basic local strategies. For example, many small business websites are
optimized for specific keywords or subject areas, but are rarely
optimized for local searches. If you have a gift basket business, you’ll
want to be sure that users searching for gift baskets in your
geographic area will find you.
7. Comments and Conversations About Your Company
Whether or not you are a party to the conversations, people will talk
about your company. How do you monitor and, when appropriate, join
those discussions?
Basic Strategy: There are five simple steps you can take today to begin paying attention to conversations about your business.
First, set up Google Alerts.
Google Alerts are free email updates from Google search results about
any topic you’re interested in tracking. For example, I track, among
other alerts, the names of our competitors, the name of our company, and
certain other terms I believe are important to my business. Anytime
Google adds something to its index that mentions my company or the other
terms I’m tracking, I receive an immediate email notification with a
link to that item. Alerts can be set up for web, blog, news, video, or
groups searches.
Second, review the results in your web analytics data. At my company, we use Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides detailed and
very useful information about your website traffic and the effectiveness
of your marketing efforts. When we run social media campaigns, we’ll
often attach tracking tags to those campaigns so that we can properly
monitor them in Google Analytics. This is important because without such
data it will be nearly impossible for you to evaluate the success of
your social media marketing efforts. But analytics are important for
another reason: they’ll tell you which sites are sending traffic to your
site.
Third, search Facebook. In August, Facebook rolled out a real-time search engine
(the search box is on the top right of any Facebook page). One
effective way to take advantage of Facebook search is to search for your
company’s name to see who is talking about your company and what
they’re saying. In several months, you’ll be able to search Facebook
updates directly from Bing, which will be integrating Facebook public
updates into Bing’s search results.
Fourth, search Twitter. You currently can search Twitter for
real-time results (if you’re not logged in, just go to Twitter’s
homepage). One easy way to monitor conversations about your company is
to search for your company’s name. You can also currently do this on
Bing, which is indexing Twitter updates. Very soon, you’ll also be able to search Twitter updates (and other social media content) via Google’s Social Search (Social Search was rolled out
to Google Labs recently, as an experimental product). You can also use
Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic to save searches and monitor
in real-time whenever someone uses a specific word or phrase in a tweet.
Finally, take advantage of services that will, similar to Google Alerts, push data to you. I use and like BackType,
which is a real-time search engine that indexes online conversations in
thousands of blogs and social networks. I use BackType primarily to
keep up with conversations in blogs. Every day, I receive emails from
BackType with links to comments that include the keywords I’m
monitoring. Without these alerts, I would be unable to monitor so many
blogs, and my ability to respond to posts about my company would be very
limited.
Advanced Strategy: If you’re having trouble keeping
track of your various search strategies, you should consolidate your
efforts and leverage one of the many applications that will help you
monitor the social web. I have not personally used these services, but
they appear to be held in high esteem by knowledgeable people who have.
For example,
truVOICE provides keyword monitoring of the social web with an emphasis on blogs and forums, while
Radian6
pulls in a lot of information from the social web, analyzes it, and
provides consumer sentiment ratings for your brand. A good resource to
learn about paid social media monitoring tools is Mashable’s post
Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For.
In addition to monitoring, you’ll need to decide how, when, and where
you’ll engage in conversations. It’ll be very difficult for you to
engage in conversations everywhere, so you should spend some time
learning the various networks and deciding where you should focus your
efforts. Looking at your website analytics data — if you own an online
business — will help a great deal because it’ll help you to better
understand where your traffic is coming from. If much of your traffic
originates from Twitter and Facebook, for example, you’ll want to spend
more time on those services.
8. Multimedia
Multimedia (video, photos, audio) is a bit more complicated for many
small businesses to execute, but can provide excellent social media
marketing opportunities.
Basic Strategy: YouTube
has been constantly evolving and adding features that make it an
attractive social site for small businesses. Although you don’t have to
produce videos to participate on
YouTube,
you should consider whether simple videos can help your marketing
efforts. For example, if you’re already posting videos to your blog, you
can upload them to YouTube to reach a broader audience, and embed the
video content in your blog posts. YouTube has also been adding more
comprehensive activity updates for its users and has made pretty
powerful analytics tools available so that you can evaluate the
effectiveness of your video content.
Similarly, you could start a
Flickr
account for your business and post photos of your customers or your
products (or both). Flickr offers a place where people can share photos
with others, but also has discussion groups, many focused on local
markets, that offer additional opportunities for you to market your
business. You can also consider setting up your own Internet radio talk
show using
BlogTalkRadio,
which is another way to use multimedia to speak directly to your
customers. Get creative with it — own a restaurant? Start a call-in
show for people to ask cooking questions. Are you a piano teacher?
Perhaps you could start a show to talk about classical music.
Advanced Strategy: Advanced strategies using
multimedia are complicated and typically benefit from using experienced
consultants. One effective way to leverage video, for example, is to
create content that has the potential to become viral. While I don’t
believe you can set out to make a viral video (an incredible amount of
luck is typically involved), there are a number of things you can
typically do to build awareness about your small business using viral
video (these strategies are beyond the scope of this post). Once you’ve
created good content, you’ll want to distribute it using as many social
networks as you can.
When you consider how you can leverage social networks, think about
whether each network provides an audience or a technology solution (or
both). For example, YouTube provides both a huge audience and a solution
for uploading video files. Flickr can also provide both an audience and
a technology solution, but not for every business. While your customers
might not be on Flickr, you can still use Flickr as a place to store
and tag your photos, and then distribute those photos to other social
networks where you prefer to invest more time and effort.
9. Maintain Brand Consistency
We’ve discussed only a small handful of social networks. There are
hundreds, if not thousands, of others, and new ones spring up every day.
That means that your customers will have many different ways to find
you. But they won’t find you if your brand is scattered across social
networks using different usernames and profiles. Let’s review some
strategies for making sure that your brand is consistent across social
networks.
Basic Strategy: Usernames and user profiles are
already showing up in search results. Do a search for your company’s
name on Google right now — if you also have a Twitter account with the
same name, odds are pretty good that the Twitter account will appear
very high in the search results. This means that having a consistent
username across the various social networks is very important. At a
minimum, if you haven’t registered your company name on the major
networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), you should do that today.
For many small businesses, their user accounts on social networks will
be the highest ranked pages in search results.
You should also evaluate your email and web presence strategies. For
example, are you using a Gmail email address when you can very easily be
using a custom email address with your company name as your domain?
Compare:
username@gmail.com with
username@website.com
— which looks more professional? Similarly, are you hosting your blog
at WordPress.com instead of on your own custom domain? Little details
can make a difference.
Advanced Strategy: Things get a bit more complicated
when you consider that there are many different social networks, and
it’s tough to predict which of them will become popular and which will
fail. Use a service such as
namechk or
KnowEm
to see whether your username is available on dozens of popular social
networks and if it’s not, to see which username could be registered
across all social networks.
Maintaining name consistency is important, but isn’t enough by
itself. You’ll also want to make sure that your brand speaks with a
common “voice” across the social networks. This may be easier said than
done. Social networks differ in significant ways from one another and
present unique challenges for interacting with customers and potential
customers on those networks.
Speaking with a common “voice” doesn’t mean that only one person
should execute your company’s social media marketing strategy, but it
does mean that everyone who speaks on behalf of your company in social
media reflects your brand in a consistent way. I recommend you read Shel
Israel’s recently published book “
Twitterville,” for excellent tips and stories focusing on how large and small businesses can develop a consistent voice in social media.
10. Leverage Combinations of Social Media Tools
One of the best ways for small businesses to leverage social media
marketing is to use various social networks in combination with each
other.
Basic Strategy: At a minimum, you should do several
things today to cross-market across the various social networks you’re
most likely already using. Here are three suggestions:
First, connect your Twitter account to Facebook
so that your tweets will appear in your public updates on Facebook.
This will let you leverage your time on Twitter to also update your
Facebook fans.
Second, connect your LinkedIn profile to your WordPress blog.
LinkedIn allows you to publish, in your profile, synopses of the most
recent blog posts on your blog. This application will automatically
update your LinkedIn profile with your most recent blog posts.
Third, integrate Twitter tools into your blog. I like and use the TweetMeme retweet button on my blogs to make it easier for users to tweet about the blog posts. I also use the ShareThis tool to enable readers to quickly share content on multiple social networks.
Advanced Strategy: Advanced strategies require
careful planning/execution and appropriate tools. In nearly all cases,
your goal is to maximize the value of your content. For example, if
you’re posting videos on YouTube or
Vimeo,
you can blog about those videos on your company’s blog. Then, you can
tweet about the blog posts on Twitter (which I assume is integrated with
your Facebook account). This way, you’ve taken one piece of content and
found a way to leverage it across multiple social networks.
You’ll also want to consider ways that you can optimize the
distribution to multiple social networks at the same time. Leverage
tools to help you do this. For example,
Ping.fm
lets you update multiple social networks all in one go. Keep in mind
that not all social networks will make sense for every business. Learn
which networks are best for your business and find ways to leverage
combinations of those networks to make your marketing more effective.
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