The Social Media Marketer

Small Business Social Media Strategies- Part 3

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We’re often asked, Why should small businesses, with their overworked managers and limited marketing resources, bother with such things as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube - with social media content strategy, that is?

In our book, there’s one very good answer to this question: These and other forms of social media provide a highly effective means of marketing while also helping to save money. Using social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter, or just firing up a blog, can save any small business - and large ones, too - a good deal of cost in the way of establishing and maintaining a strong presence on the Web. 

In the good old days - say, a couple of years ago - common wisdom dictated that every small business needed to invest in its own website. But as anyone who went out to get that done very quickly found out, that generally meant shelling out significant bucks. If an entrepreneur opted for hiring a Web-design firm to help it create a customized site, hundreds if not thousands of dollars would be involved. And every update, change, or extension of the site meant more money.

Today, a growing number of businesses do just fine with maintaining their own pages on Facebook as part of a social media content strategy. Not only is it completely free to set up such a page - and to change and add to it as frequently as you like - that page is by definition embedded in by far the largest, most biggest, most active online community in the whole entire world. Facebook, last we looked, has registered well more than 500 million people worldwide, and in theory, any one of those people could find and “like” your website with a mere click of their mouse.

Likewise, Google’s Blogger service, among others, makes it painless - and absolutely cost-free, too - to set up a personalized blog. You can post to your blog from any Web browser, a mobile phone or, for complete control, any of a number of feature-rich blog-editing programs available for PCs and Macs. We’ve been using Blogger for years now, and can attest to its power.

YouTube is yet another 100% free service, and a most powerful addition to any social media content strategy. These days, videos are so easy to create - whole movies, complete with characters and plots, have been made using only Nokia mobile phones - and done right, they deliver a punch that’s hard to match with words alone. 

Twitter, too, is free to use. Its great power lies in it ability to quickly get the word out to people who’ve signed up with you - a dozen or 1,000 - about your latest blog post, newest Facebook comment, freshest YouTube video, or anything else new and exciting that you’d like your followers to take a look at and remember you by.
 

And that, in a nutshell, demonstrates the enormous power of a social media content strategy. While each format has its unique advantages and limitations, the real juice kicks in when these different tools get used in alliance with each other. Tweeting about a new blog post, for instance, could send a crowd of people to take a look - and, if they’re pleased, to retweet your link to masses more people. Your blog might offer visitors a Facebook “Like” button, which would link them to you in that venue and enable them to pass links to your blog to their circles of friends. Your blog post might also contain a YouTube video which, again, would be easily shared across any number of social nets.
 

Finally, there’s the all-important fact to keep in mind that now, Google is feeding social media mentions into its ranking of search results. In brief, it’s harnessing its own Google+ social network, a direct competitor to Facebook, in such a way that when I share a particular page with my pals on Google+, that sharing gets highlighted - complete with my photo - whenever that page shows up in their list of search results. As Google+ gains strength, as most analysts believe it will, this will make that network yet another venue that small businesses shouldn’t ignore.

Some interesting discussions of how Google search results are being affected by social media are available at ChristopherSPenn.com and SEOMoz.org. They’re certainly worth checking out.

As we’ll explore in our next posting in this series, while small businesses should almost certainly grab the social media bull by the horns and get involved, right now, they do need to pay attention and use these tools with care - for their audiences and for their own reputations.