Social Media Marketing for Small Business

Social Media marketing for small business can be a powerful tool for communicating and interacting with your existing clients as well as generating interest from perspective new customers. In the past 3 years, social media has gone from a niche activity enjoyed by a small group of early adopters to becoming an integral part of the fabric of our society. As the tools of technology – in particular mobile devices – become ever more common and affordable, so also increases the ease of accessibility by which individuals can tap in to and interact with the platforms and applications that make social media the next evolution in human communication and interaction.

So what exactly does social media mean when approached from a marketing and advertising perspective? And how can small businesses tap into the same tools, concepts and practices that large fortune-500 companies have already been doing for the past decade? Over the next six weeks, we will be posting a series of blog articles designed to ease you and your company into the world of social media marketing. We will cover all the basics, explain key concepts and discuss what kinds of goals and results you should focus on by which you can measure your level of success. If you’d like to follow along, please subscribe to our RSS feed – you will be notified via e-mail when new entries are published.

We also understand that there is a broad range of existing knowledge that readers may already have. We will not go too deep into the specific details. There are lots of YouTube videos, blogs and FAQ pages already around that deliver step-by-step tutorials, some of which we will refer you to for further information. We will instead focus on marketing and branding concepts and what strategies and good-habits you and your staff can start implementing right now.

We’ll even give you homework! Each week, we’ll leave you with a few simple tasks to complete on your own to get the ball rolling followed by the next step the following week. Pretty soon you’ll be up and running and discovering just how simple and intuitive these tasks really are. Think of this blog series as a free course in social media for your small business.

We will focus on three primary applications – Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. These are the social media platforms that are experiencing the most traffic, the most off-line attention (as they are frequently referred to in print, on television and on the radio) as well as having the broadest demographic of users. In our last and final blog entry of the series, we will dive into some of the more obscure and less-known applications of the media 2.0 world. We will briefly discuss how you can further incorporate them into your strategy and increase your internet foot-print which, at the end of the day, is the name of the game.

And of course, we’d love to hear from you! If you have any specific questions you’d like to see covered, please post them below in the comments box. If your question is featured in a future blog posting, your business will receive a complimentary website analysis service care of Yardstick Services. Don’t be shy; we want to hear from you!

In addition, if you’d like to contact me privately, feel free to e-mail me directly at [email protected], and I’ll be more than happy to give you as much insight as I can.

FURTHER READING:

Social Media for Small Business Part 1: Good Listeners Make Good Communicators

Social Media for Small Business Supplement: Cross-Pollination

Social Media Marketing for Small Business Case Study: Viral Video

Social Media Marketing for Small Business Part 2: Start a Conversation