How Can a Small Business Owner Benefit from Social Media?

May 4, 2008

The nice thing about Social Media is that the small business owner can compete directly with larger businesses to reach potential customers. Sure you can buy advertising and sponsor sections of various social media and that costs money, but most of the tools are free. Also, since the social media world is by its nature connected, most of the methods of communicating are as well. For instance, your Facebook page can include updates from Twitter as well as being able to share blog posts with your Facebook friends.

Each business is different, so different types of social media might be more or less effective. Generally though, these are the 5 social media that I find essential for small businesses to use for promoting their brand.

1. Blogs - You can signup for a free account on blogger or wordpress.com and start sharing knowlege and interacting with your customers. This shouldn’t be a list of what you did today, but things that are beneficial to your customers and potential customers. Blogs can be on any subject and you can post as frequently or infrequently as you want, but you should try to post at least once a week to keep your customers engaged.

2. RSS and Feedburner - Now that you have a blog you need to give your customers a way to recieve your updates and as nice as email is, it is slowly becoming less and less valuable because of too much spam. Most blogs provide the ability to distribute your posts as RSS Feeds where people can subscribe and your blog updates them when you make a post. Feedburner also sends out a message to various search engines letting them know there is something new on your site. This means that your content won’t just be available to your subscribers, but also those that might be searching for information about your topic.

3. Twitter - To many businesses, Twitter may not be appropriate, but if you have a consumer product Twitter can be a wonderful thing. I’ll go into Twitter in a future article, but in general you can think of Twitter as a mini-blog where you are sending out quick 140 character updates rather than long posts like this one. One of the big uses of Twitter is that you can also connect your RSS feeds to it and send out updates to your Twitter followers. Your Twitter followers can then respond to your news and share it with their friends, allowing your message to gain exposure to people beyond your immediate circle.

4. LinkedIn - This is most beneficial for B2B businesses, but I would suggest that consumer businesses should be on here as well since every business deals with other businesses at some point. Linkedin allows you to post individual people’s profiles on their network - so you might want to post yours as the owner, as well as your VP of Sales and any other “public” people. Once your Linkedin profile is established you can begin networking - looking for potential partners for an upcoming project, as well as searching for great new talent to add to your company by asking your online network to help you search. Of course, this is over-simplified and I’ll discuss it in more detail with a future article.

5. Digg - This is a FANTASTIC tool for getting your news included in Google as quickly as possible. It is also a free way to promote your brand to a group of elite decision makers who will decide if it is worth promoting or not. Digg works best if you can leverage a group of friends to promote your news early on, but even with a single Digg you’ll send Google running to your website to check out your news and more than likely Digg readers as well. In the Digg world, the more “diggs” your news has the more important it is. So this is why it can be good to have a network of friends willing to support you and inflate you numbers early on.

You may have noticed that I didn’t include Facebook or MySpace in the top 5 list above. That’s because I don’t consider them essential to the small business owner. I am however an absolute LOVER of Facebook because of the potential of their advertising system, but Facebook takes a long time to build a following and it works best as a place where you can interact with your customers, rather than promote to them directly with positive results.

What do you think? What are your favorite social media networks that small business owners can benefit from?

Posted in Social Media Marketing