by Nick Pascarella (Certified Microsoft Partner) / TruBambu
Considering Social Media Marketing and don’t know where
to start. Begin by outlining clear goals for your social media
marketing efforts and figuring out how you’ll measure success.
Once you’ve outlined your goals, there are several ways
to leverage social media for your marketing efforts.
Facebook offers exceptional, low
cost marketing opportunities for small business. Facebook has
millions of users, and 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.
Twitter has grown tremendously
over the past year. For some small businesses, it offers an incredible
marketing platform.
Spend a little time 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 how they’re using it. Search for your business
name – your customers may already be talking about you!
LinkedIn is a business oriented
social network for professionals, and it’s huge, with millions
of users from over 200 countries.
LinkedIn has some powerful features that many people don’t
use. 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 and it helps your LinkedIn profile
come up high in search engine results.
Another strategy involves the
subject matter groups on LinkedIn. Find some groups that have
a connection to your 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.
Although there’s more attention
focused today on social networks than on company blogs, blogs
continue to offer great value for small businesses. 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 can be valuable contacts for you.
Using mobile social networks and
other local strategies can help too.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.
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 another
local strategy such as adding your business to Google Maps. You
can do the same on Bing.
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? One way is to set up Google Alerts. Google
Alerts are free email updates from Google search results about
any topic you’re interested in tracking.
Multimedia (video, photos, audio)
is a bit more complicated for many small businesses to execute,
but can provide excellent social media marketing opportunities.
It is important to maintain brand
consistency. You won’t be found if your brand is scattered
across social networks using different usernames and profiles.
Seems like a lot of effort and
time to do? There are many ways to streamline the process. Investing
a small and dedicated amount of time to using Social Media Marketing
will be far less in cost and more far reaching to your audience
than the advertising approaches of yesterday.
Your Business Will Grow Wild!
Nick Pascarella|Principal
( 201.294.9157 | nickp@trubambu.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/trubambu
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