How Small Businesses Can Leverage Social Media

I just finished recording a podcast hosted by my friend Heather Foster who is the VP of Marketing for ControlScan. Heather interviewed me to ask me how small businesses can leverage Social Media, and so I thought I would share with you her questions and my answers:

HEATHER:
Can you please provide our audience with an overview of Social Networking and include some website examples?

JOE:
Social Networking is nothing more than a way for people to connect and share information online. Before you can get involved with Social Networking from a business standpoint you have to participate from a personal standpoint. Keep in mind whether you are marketing to BtoB or BtoC companies, you are trying to reach PEOPLE who are involved with social media.

Some of the most popular social networking sites include:
• Blogs and Reviews on your site
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Flickr
• LinkedIn

HEATHER:
Which social networking sites are more business friendly?

JOE:
All mentioned above are business friendly depending on what you are trying to accomplish. If you are trying to network to find potential clients, partners, contacts, then LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, Bebo, or Spoke are good. If you are trying to create buzz and traffic blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are good.

HEATHER:
What are 5 simple ways small businesses can use social networking as a marketing channel – in particular e-commerce and retail?

JOE:
1. Launch a company blog with great original content (using free tools like Blogger, WordPress, TypePad) with lots of photos and links and to great resources and other content. Keep the blog posts SHORT! Also participate in “micro-blogging” on Twitter.

2. Create a Facebook “Fan Page” and a MySpace profile for your brand.

3. Use LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, Bebo, and Spoke to network with people who can help you promote your brand.

4. Create fun, original videos and podcasts to be promoted on YouTube, Revver, etc.

5. Post and tag photos on Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, or Photobucket.

HEATHER:
How can companies measure results from their social networking programs?

JOE:
The answer to this question depends on your business. The beautiful thing about Social Networking tools is they are highly measurable. If you are trying to drive additional traffic to your website, then benchmark your site traffic before trying some of the measures, and look at the lift. If you are trying to increase sales opportunities, look at the number of contacts you make in sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, MySpace, etc. If you are trying to drive buzz for a new product, look at how many bloggers link to your video, blog, photos, etc. (You can use Technorati to measure blog mentions of your product name).

At the end of the day we are all trying to make more sales, so all of the efforts should be measured by sales lift, but there needs to be patience that the sales increase will not happen overnight, and that participating in these communities takes effort. You have to participate and not just TAKE.

HEATHER:
How can businesses keep up with all of the current and emerging social networking sites?

JOE:
Reading blogs and experimenting is the best way. I employ a blog reader like Google Reader, Bloglines, or MyYahoo which allows you to aggregate all of your blogs into one place.

Some of my favorite social media blogs are:
Seth Godin
Chris Brogan
Bert Dumars
Toby Bloomberg
Sherry Heyl

Here is a recent article by Mack Collier from SearchEngineGuide.com with links to several Social Media blogs.

Also here at Engauge a wide cross section of our employees blog frequently about Social Media:
http://blog.engauge.com/

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 11:39 am and is filed under Digital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.