How Can Small Business Leverage Social Media?

It’s everywhere you look. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube... and on and on. The digital age is upon us and it seems everyone, and every business, is on the bandwagon. Are you?

Setting up a Twitter account and a Facebook business page is a nice start but it’s not going to accomplish much for your bottom line unless you take the next steps. Social networks like these require you to be, well, social. That means you can’t set up an account, check in once in a while, and expect a revenue spike. Social media for business is a time intensive practice and you’ll need to devote resources to it to see benefits. But the benefits can be great so it’s something worth learning more about.

WHAT TO DO?

First, set your goals. What do you wish to accomplish with social media? Is it strictly ‘more customers’? Well, that’s a fairly broad goal. How about, ‘I want to attract more targeted traffic to my website’. Okay, that’s still somewhat broad, but we’ll start with that.

In the old days, attracting targeted traffic to your site meant SEO. Nowadays, things are vastly different. Today it’s all handled by SEO.

Huh?

Well, social media, has, in many ways blended with SEO. Today, you can, and should, attempt to increase your search engine rankings for valuable keywords by using old, tried and true SEO methods, coupled with all that the social media landscape has to offer.

For instance, blogging and article marketing. Do you consider yourself a decent writer? Maybe you wouldn’t know what to do with a comma if your life depended on it. Either way, you’re really going to need to get serious about creating content that represents and promotes your business. Whether you or an employee writes it, or even if an outside company specializing in that sort of thing does, a steady stream of written content is one of the primary ways in which to both build and enhance your brand, as well as to get you noticed by the search engines—and of course those people using the search engines to find you.

AN EXAMPLE OF HOW TO LEVERAGE SOCIAL MEDIA

You write an engaging, informative blog post that presents in its title and copy, a keyword or two that you wish to rank highly for. Let’s say you want to be represented on the first results page of Google when people search for “Brooklyn Auto Mechanic”. You write a blog post with that term in the title, as well as in one or two places in the post. You link the term in the copy of your post directly to the url of your business website: which is an auto mechanic located in Brooklyn, NY, of course. You then spend a few hours spreading the post across a group of your favorite social networks, bookmarking sites, blogs, articles sites, etc.

Two things happen here that are oh so valuable.

One, anyone reading your blog post or article about, for example, “5 Ways To Make Sure Your Brooklyn Auto Mechanic Doesn’t Overcharge You” will read your valuable suggestions and then be subtly directed to your website via links (if they choose to click on them), or a short sentence at the bottom of the post/article.

Two, Google and other search engines love the fact that there’s a link pointing to your website from another site. Especially since the link has the anchor text “Brooklyn Auto Mechanic”. When you begin to develop other links from other sites, the search engines really begin to like you. Before long, depending on the competition for the keyword(s) you’re targeting, you may find your website, or at least the article/post that points people to your website, on the first page of the search engine results page. How valuable is that!

Now, this is not the only way in which small business may leverage social media. You might use your Facebook or Twitter accounts to interact with customers, answer questions, head off negative press/comments, promote new products/services, etc. You might post videos to YouTube. You may even start using Foursquare to attract people to your physical location, if appropriate. There are so many other ways to leverage social media. The point is that as a small business, you need to do what’s easiest, smartest and returns the biggest bang for your time, effort and dollars. Whatever social method(s) you employ, just make sure they’re right for you. Knowing what’s right of course requires some trial and error so if you’re not fully yet into social media, consider starting now. There’s so much to be gained here for such a relatively small investment.