One of the great things about social media is that it gives anyone the opportunity to have powerful marketing tools at their fingers and many of the best ones are free. Free, at least monetarily, there is still the cost of time and effort.
This post is prompted by a request I received today from one of my twitter followers, California Tea & Coffee Brewery. They have a small company, have been set up on twitter, have a blog, and have started doing the basics of of social media. It’s a start.
Here are some tips on getting started on using social media for your small business, and all for free:
Have a plan – Social Media, when used by businesses, is marketing. When you get started it is ok to look around a bit, test it out, learn how it works, but to make it effective you need to have a plan. Answer the questions:
Who is the target audience and where are they now on line?
What do you want out of using social media?
What can you do and learn to do on your own, or who can you lean on to help you?
What resources do you have?
Use the answers to these questions to create a plan. The plan should be layed out to get you what you want out of social media. Keep this all in mind as I present the rest of these tips – they should help you answer the question on what you can do or learn.
Blog – Your blog is the base for your social media. Even if you have a huge on-line web presence that is not a blog – to do social media right you need a blog. Social media is about interaction with your community, audience, fans, subscribers, friends, partners, customers, or consumers. The blog provides a format for you to interact with them. Tell them what you are doing, provide tips, answer concerns, even to discuss where the company/business should go. When you start listening to what your audience has to say you will better understand them and they will feel the love.
Now this is all fine and dandy, but how do you blog for free? Here are a the two most common options:
Blogger – This is a widely used blogging service owned by Google. It is simple to use and free if you use their URL, blogspot.com, with your sub-domain (ie. yourblog.blogspot.com). It is a great way to start for a small business.
Wordpress.com – Wordpress.org is the most used blogging platform for businesses, it is not self hosted, though free to use and open-source, web-hosting is not free. Wordpress.com is the thinned down version and is self hosted. Similar to Blogger your URL is yourblog.wordpress.com.
A third option is a little less traditional, but I feel will become more and more common and I feel is a great way to start blogging on a small free level:
Facebook – latter I will talk about having a Facebook Fan page, this blog would be part of that fan page. If the majority of your audience is on Facebook and not on twitter then this option might just be for you – no need for cross content… and it’s free. The simplest way to do this is to use the notes section of your fan page. When you create a new note it will then post to your fan page wall, you can also set it to post to your personal wall. Then any likes and comments from anywhere on Facebook on your note will show up linked with your fan page note.
Twitter – Twitter is also a must. See my post, Why Your Business Needs to Twitter, for reasons why. As to how to use it people write books like crazy on this. For a business it’s all about the followers you have; who you want them to be, who they are, how they follow you, and how you interact with them.
Followers come from all over, typically you want your followers to be your captive audience – people interested in your business. To get these types of followers, they could join you because you let them know you are on Twitter (from a link on your blog or web site, a sign in your store or whatever). You can also do searches for Twitter users using key words related to your business and then follow those people, tweet about them and then hope they follow you. You can also actively follow up to 1000 users a day (after you follow 2000, you can only follow 10% more then are following you). Getting over the 2000 mark can be difficult for some (this is one of the things I do for businesses). The more followers you have though, the more reach you have with both your target followers and all the rest that have come for the show. I recommend, while following those who are interested in your niche, to also try to grow your followers in general.
How do they follow you is also important to understand. When you tweet a link only about 1-5% of your followers will even see the tweet (it really depends though on who is following you) and if you are lucky 1-2% will click on it (around 2% of my followers that will click on a good link I post). Now consider, if you just have 400 followers, then you could get 4-8 people to click on the link. If you had 10,000 followers; that’s 100-200 – at 100000 followers then your looking at 1000-2000.
How you interact will greatly effect who and how many people follow you, and your links. If you listen and interact with your Twitter followers the more they will pay attention – perhaps even follow your Twitter’s RSS feed.
Facebook – Set up a Facebook fan page. There are over 250 million active users on Facebook and almost half of those visit Facebook at least once a day. On your fan page you can set up your blog RSS feed to pull to the notes or you can also add third party apps such as Networked Blogs to pull in your feed. Facebook will also give you a location where people can interact with you. For ideas on how to engage people on Facebook I recommend looking at the following two Facebook resources:
Both these sites provide tools, tips and examples of what you can do with Facebook. Check out some of the examples if you are looking for ideas on how things can be set up and how they interact with their fans.
These 4 points are just the beginning, but for a small business this might be all you can handle without hiring someone part-full time – in fact it could be more than enough to keep you occupied. Then you can call someone like me and I can help you take it to the next level or just help you get through these. With consistent effort and skill you can do a lot on your own to promote and build your business using social media. Enjoy it too.
Social Media Marketing for Free – For the Small Business
One of the great things about social media is that it gives anyone the opportunity to have powerful marketing tools at their fingers and many of the best ones are free. Free, at least monetarily, there is still the cost of time and effort.
This post is prompted by a request I received today from one of my twitter followers, California Tea & Coffee Brewery. They have a small company, have been set up on twitter, have a blog, and have started doing the basics of of social media. It’s a start.
Here are some tips on getting started on using social media for your small business, and all for free:
Use the answers to these questions to create a plan. The plan should be layed out to get you what you want out of social media. Keep this all in mind as I present the rest of these tips – they should help you answer the question on what you can do or learn.
Now this is all fine and dandy, but how do you blog for free? Here are a the two most common options:
A third option is a little less traditional, but I feel will become more and more common and I feel is a great way to start blogging on a small free level:
Both these sites provide tools, tips and examples of what you can do with Facebook. Check out some of the examples if you are looking for ideas on how things can be set up and how they interact with their fans.
These 4 points are just the beginning, but for a small business this might be all you can handle without hiring someone part-full time – in fact it could be more than enough to keep you occupied. Then you can call someone like me and I can help you take it to the next level or just help you get through these. With consistent effort and skill you can do a lot on your own to promote and build your business using social media. Enjoy it too.