Small Business and Social Media

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Social Media is a very effective business marketing tool promoting the company and its products. Using social websites as a marketing strategy will give you a great advantage over your competition. It has become an essential marketing tool and is not to be under estimated.

Many small business entrepreneurs think this way of marketing is only meant to be for large companies. The fact is any business investing in Social Marketing can improve customer loyalty and increase the possibility of up selling.

Social websites has become the word of mouth in today’s terms. Many business owners can link a direct increase of sales by using social websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

According to quantcast.com Facebook is most popular amongst the age group between 18 and 49 in the US.

Having a website is just not enough anymore. Facebook and Twitter has become an excellent resource for people and businesses that are looking for recommendations on anything from local plumbers to medical doctors. These sites have also become a platform discussing experiences and different brands. This is the simplest and easiest way to generate leads or prospects.

Many small businesses do not have time or the expertise to make use of these incredible tools and therefore outsource to companies helping to optimize their existing websites and setup their Social websites. SMO (social media optimization) is just as important as SEO (search engine optimization) as far as Internet marketing is concerned. Using company time posting updates to fan pages and Twitter can be very time-consuming and probably a waste of time if not taking the company goals, resources etc. in consideration. Managing your organization’s social websites is a full-time job and a special skill set. Outsourcing will save you a lot of time and money and leave you to concentrate on your companies main objective.

Local business owners should use every effort guiding prospects to their social websites by offering discounts when clicking the “Like” button for instance. This way you are getting their details legally and now the interaction starts by promoting specials etc. Your customers then become clients and before you know it you have generated leads you probably never would have had. The days are over using the yellow pages and paper adverts. You now are using direct marketing, and you interact with people who are interested in what you have to offer.

The fact is Social Media is the new generation of communication with prospects and clients.

Your Marketing Guide For Your Blog

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For this guide, we will take an example of a stock blog. The blog talks about investing in stock. The purpose of this guide is to build traffic for your site. This guide will require no money. The strategy is divided into two parts, daily and weekly strategy.

DAILY strategy: (Total 1 hour 15 minutes)

  • Create a post about daily stock market activities. Which stock is on the move, and why is it. (15 minutes)
  • Find 3 forums which talks about stock (your niche). You can search at Google for “stock forum”. The forum must be popular and have lots of activity. Register into the forum and create attractive signature. You can use color and bold for your signature. Post five post for each forum. Post in popular thread and be the first to reply post. (15 minutes per forum. Total 45 minutes)
  • When looking at the forum, take a note of other people blog and interesting topics. Visit one blog from your blog list. If you have 7 blogs on your list, you can visit them all in 7 days, a week. If you have 14 blogs on your list, you will visit them all in 14 days, two week. Read their blog, take a note of interesting topics, and comment on their blog. (15 minutes)

WEEKLY strategy: (Total 1 hour 5 minutes)

  • Remember that we have taken note of interesting topics when visiting forums and other people blogs. Do some research on Google about the topic. For example, in recent weeks stocks around the world went down sharply. You can do some research why this happen. Write an article of 500 words or more on the topic. Post the article on your blog. (45 minutes)
  • Submit your article to Social Bookmarking Sites like digg.com and del.icio.us. (5 minutes)
  • Post your article at your top 3 forums of your choice. (5 minutes)
  • Submit your article to EzineArticles.com or articlecity.com or any website that will accept your article. (15 minutes)
  • Check your blog’s traffic statistic. You can see your progress and plan a strategy based on your traffic statistic. If one forum does not gives you enough traffic, you might want to change another forum.