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Social Media for Your Small Business
As a small business owner you are overwhelmed with the amount of things you need to accomplish each day. Depending on the type of business you’re in you’re probably either more or less tuned into the world of social media. Depending on your level of sophistication for social this article may be somewhat redundant but for those that are neophytes, enjoy.
Social media offers everyone the opportunity to expand their present offline networking strategies to the online world and to promote their companies. First thing you need to do before entering the world of social media is to understand the following:
Know what people are saying about your business
Understand what your present customers think about your product or service. Ask them why they decided to use your company. Does their perception of your company match up with your company’s mission statement or key value propositions? If there are some discrepancies between the two make sure to adjust your marketing position to one that gives your business a clearer message and value proposition.
What are your business goals and customer profile?
Be clear about your business objectives and what you are trying to accomplish. Business objectives (or organizational goals) always come first. Determine what you want to say about your business and how you want to be perceived by potential customers. Make sure you are clear on who your best customer is. What do they look like? How much money do they make? Where do they live? Know everything about them and then go about reaching out to them through social media.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a Blog
Let’s look at several social media options that you should consider using to communicate about your business.
Facebook gives you access to a quarter of a billion people and is growing. The volume of people is not as important as who you target on Facebook. This is something else that the site allows you to do very easily through its 30-second setup display ads platform. Facebook also offers Business Pages, complete with viewership stats via the Insights data available to Business Page administrators. You can embed Facebook applications in your business page, and you can drive traffic to it since the business page, unlike a Facebook Group, can be viewed (but not interacted with) by non-members of Facebook.
Twitter is a hot app right now, but that's not enough of a business reason to use it. Here's what is: Your customers use Twitter to talk about you. Hot or not, Twitter is a lay-up for listening. Set yourself up on Twitter, go easy on the "all about me" tweets, and use a client like TweetDeck to search for mentions of your brand, product, or service in real time, as well as those of your competitors. You'll be fairly amazed at what you find and at how easy it is to keep abreast of conversations that matter to you.
No doubt you know that LinkedIn offers a network directory service. But did you know that you can create a company page? Just like your profile, you can create a page that represents your company.
Your business blog
I saved this for last because it’s often the anchor of everything else. Your blog is where you talk, in depth, about things you are passionate about, about your industry, and about events and legislation related to it. Search engines love blogs and by linking all of your social profiles to it you increase visibility for all the components of our social program.
It’s time to increase your social presence now. Good luck.
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