Social Media Strategy Ideas for Small Businesses

Who says you have to spend thousands of dollars for a spectacular marketing campaign? With social media, both big and small businesses alike can compete for their target audience’s attention. All it will take is a strategy, a little creativity, and these steps to make a social media marketing campaign that can’t be beat. 

1.       Have a Goal and Stick With it

Know exactly how many times you are going to tweet or post to your other social media networks per day. You shouldn’t tweet so much that your followers are beginning to tune you out, but you should tweet just enough so that your business stays on the minds of your audience. The number can be adjusted, but I recommend posting a status update or tweet about 4 or 5 times throughout the day. Once you have this number decided, keep your posts consistent. Try to post something at the same time every day so that your followers will know when to expect it.

2.        Customer Service is #1, Even on the Internet

If people are leaving comments, questions, or concerns for you, make to respond as quickly as possible. This will show your readers that you care about how your customers feel. Even if someone posts a problem they have had with your products or company, try to resolve it through social media. If you are leaving questions or comments unanswered, this will have them feeling dissatisfied with your company and most likely seeking the help of your competitors instead. Great customer service can go a long way for your business’s reputation.

3.       Remember All of Your Social Media Networks

Depending on what social media tool your customers use the most, utilizing each social media tool will reach a larger audience, as well as those people who only use one specific social media website. Don’t forget to keep your Google +, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter pages updated since those are the ones that are the most popular.

4.       Research Your Competitors

Do a little digging to find out what social media tools your major competitors are using to get an idea of what you should also be incorporating into your social media campaign.

5.       Don’t Forget to Track Your Progress

Having a goal will do no good if you are not tracking the progress of your campaigns. Some areas that you should be tracking are the follower growth, page views, post likes or shares, and impressions.

These 5 tips will help lead your marketing strategy down the road to more brand awareness and communication among your customers.

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Social Media Marketing Means Big Business for Small Businesses [INFOGRAPHIC]

In 2013, both large and small retailers earned business by making social media a priority. But it was the small merchants, operating exclusively online, that dominated the top ranks of the social media 500, takes a closer look at how SMBs can be successful on social media by understanding the power of smart placement, great content and nimble response.

According to an Internet Retailer study, monthly referral traffic to e-commerce websites from Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube increased 42 percent, while the revenue generated from those visitors jumped nealry 63 percent. Spending on social ads by retailers supplying data increased 400 percent in 2013.

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8 LinkedIn Profile Tips for Small Business Owners

Many people think of LinkedIn as a resume of sorts. While that’s certainly true, it is also so much more. 

Get out of the mindset of “traditional resume” and get ready to learn the LinkedIn profile tips you need to know to help further market yourself and your business.

First, let’s take a look at why you need a LinkedIn profile as a small business owner. You’re not looking for a job, so how can you use LinkedIn?

Unlike other social sites, LinkedIn is not generally a place to push out “fun” messages about your product.  Rather, LinkedIn is predominantly a networking site to connect with individuals in your industry as well as find, share and engage with more in depth content.

As 260 million users are actively using LinkedIn, there’s a good chance that someone will go to your page at some point to learn a little bit more about you and your company.  Especially if they are in your particular industry or looking to learn a little bit more about who runs your company.

This is a perfect opportunity to further showcase your company and your brand by making sure your profile is inline with that brand.

Follow these tips: 

1. Use a professional photo.  The ideal size for a LinkedIn profile pictures is between 200 x 200 px and 500 x 500 px. Often times your photo will display differently across LinkedIn (see image to the right). It should be clear and professional. If you’re trying to come across as a friendly business owner, that’s something to keep in mind as well.
2. Complete your professional profile.  LinkedIn is a place where you can put all of your work experience. Include any and all experience that you think will help showcase your personality and your brand.  Keep in mind you don’t have the “1 page” rule on LinkedIn like you do with a resume.  If there are certain skill sets you want to elaborate on LinkedIn is a place to do that.
3. Your summary.  In order to add a bit more of a personal touch to your LInkedIn profile I suggest completing a summary of yourself.  This is a great place to talk candidly about why you started your business and what it means to you. Furthermore, if you are looking to gain specific connections on LinkedIn for a certain purpose, here’s a good place to point that out.  Try to keep it short and entertaining.
4. Use keywords.  Not only should you use keywords in your profile, but you should also include some keywords in your summary. Often people will be looking for someone with a very specific type of experience.
5. Your tagline. This is a great place to emphasize your brand. I highly recommend avoiding the generic. Try to stand out. Instead of just putting “business owner,” get fun with it.  Or at the very least describe what kind of business owner you are. I.e. “SF Sustainable Furniture Company Owner.” (Side note: have fun but try not to come off as arrogant.)
6. Connections. Many people are hesitant to connect with just anyone on LinkedIn.  However, I recommend connecting with as many people as possible.  Don’t go out and start trying to connect with everyone in your group, but why not accept an invitation to connect? You shouldn’t be posting anything too personal on your LinkedIn account anyway. Why not get your name and your brand in front of as many people as possible?
7. Recommendations. Testimonials go a long way for your business right? Word of mouth is everything.  Well the same can be true for yourself.  Ask those you’ve worked with, or even those who have worked for you, for recommendations.
8. Groups. Join groups relevant to your industry.  After you’ve joined these groups try to share any unique and original content from your company blog whilst prompting engagement. Furthermore, comment on popular discussions. If you have selected to get weekly digests about updates from these groups you can quickly determine which discussions are generating the most buzz. Go for those.

LinkedIn is not just for people looking for a job.  It’s a great way to put yourself out there as a leader in the industry you’re in.

Make sure you follow these LinkedIn profile tips so that you can stand out from the rest. You never know when or where someone might be looking for new business opportunities!\

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What Does Success Mean to Your Small Business?

As the year comes to an end, how do you think your small business (and you as a business owner) fared? The answer will be different for everyone, and the criteria the answer is based on will be different as well.

Depending on your goals and priorities, “success” may mean something else for you than it does for the shop owner down the street. Inc. recently did a roundup of some really interesting studies on the subject, one of which showed the different ways the small business owners who were surveyed measure their success. Where do you fit on this graph?

24% – Earn enough to live comfortably

23% – Do something I enjoy

18% – Increase profitability from year to year

9% – Pay employees enough to live comfortably

9% – Other

7% – Have free time to do what I want

6% – Pass the business to a family member

4% – Sell the business for a big profit

One interesting thing here is that while many of these measures are financial in nature, the second largest group said that doing something they enjoyed was the way they measure success – even more than increasing profitability. And while that’s interesting, it’s not entirely surprising.

If making money and increasing personal profit (salary) each year was the only important factor influencing a person’s decision making, would that person ever go out on a limb and leave the security of a large employer? Not likely. It’s the quest for independence and rewarding work that drives most people to take a chance on starting a small business.

And with Forbes reporting 28 million small businesses in the US right now, hopefully more and more people are finding the successful work life they were looking for when they struck out on their own.

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Small Business Saturday: 5 Ways to Support Local Businesses

Are you supporting local businesses? With another Black Friday in the rear view mirror and Cyber Monday just on the horizon, shoppers are encouraged to make a detour to small businesses in their town and shop local on what’s been declared Small Business Saturday.

Not familiar with this recent shopping phenomena? American Express gets credit for creating an outstanding marketing campaign that uses social media to take a grass-roots style approach to supporting local businesses. At a time when U.S. shoppers typically focus on Black Friday as a much-anticipated national event, scouring big box retailers for big post-Thanksgiving deals, someone had to stick up for the little guys. So American Express launched Small Business Saturday in 2010.

It’s now THE day to salute local shopkeepers and drop some cash on those smallest of retailers. Why has this campaign worked, becoming less of a marketing campaign and more of an annual initiative? First, American Express made it about their customers…those small business owners. It’s all about supporting them and getting people to shop with them – after people have gotten those big deals from Wal-mart and Best Buy. The credit card company also provided their customers, those small businesses, with tools (both offline and online marketing material) to help promote the big day themselves. They also used social media to create a groundswell of support and attention, American Express says that last year alone, “1.5 million Facebook users, public and private organizations and elected officials declared their support for the Small Business Saturday.” People want to support small businesses, notes the credit card retailer on their blog, because they help create jobs, pay taxes in your local community and help make your community more vibrant and unique.

I applaud this tremendous effort that America Express undertakes each year to get people excited about shopping locally. As a small business advocate, I think it’s important to keep the cash flowing to your local entrepreneurs. But, I would add that there are ways to support local businesses even if you can’t make it to their brick-and-mortar locations on the official Small Business Saturday.

Here are 5 more ways to support your local small businesses:

1. Buy online: If you can’t shop local at your favorite storefront, don’t forget many of these small businesses have e-commerce enabled websites and would welcome you to shop online, too! Why not take advantage of that convenience and shop online, just as you would from other big box retailers? Even better, you can save on shipping fees and pick up directly from the stores.

2. Write online reviews: Whether it’s on the company’s website or on review sites like Yelp, take time to provide a review or leave a comment when you’ve had a positive experience. People look to both friends and strangers to influence their buying decisions and a positive online review can help your favorite small business attract new customers.

3. Share on social media: As American Express has demonstrated, social media is an effective toolto show and spread support of local retailers. So take time to “Like” their Facebook page or Google+ page. Share their product pictures on Pinterest and Instagram. Or Tweet about the great customer service you got while shopping local. Whatever your favorite social media platform, use it to help spread the word about your favorite small business.

4. Capture your experience with video: Whether you prefer Vine or Instagram, or love to upload videos to YouTube, it’s so easy to give your favorite business a boost with video. For example, make a  Vine showing the great meal coming out of your favorite food truck; or take a quick video demonstrating  how  to use the product you purchased, or just have fun showing you and your friends out shopping. It may seem silly, but video is another powerful tool to support businesses and it’s easy to spread on social media, too.

5. Shop often – all year long: Why wait for a special initiative like Small Business Saturday to show your support? Your favorite business is probably open year-round and its website is open 24/7. So buy anytime, all the time!

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Foursquare Comes To HootSuite Dashboard

HootSuite just announced that it has partnered with Foursquare to let SMBs manage their Foursquare presence from the HootSuite dashboard. This comes at a time when Foursquare has been greatly expanding its own offerings for businesses.

“Currently, many companies do not actively manage their Foursquare locations, which means they are missing out on the opportunity to engage with customers who check in and leave tips about their business,” a HootSuite spokesperson tells WebProNews in an email. “The integration with HootSuite will give businesses the opportunity to better understand and leverage conversations and content on Foursquare in several ways.”

Those include: viewing most recent check-ins, the Mayor’s profile and customer tips left at the business’ venue, creating status updates (including deals, promotions and marketing message), and creating multiple Foursquare streams to monitor various locations and interact with users.

“Though Foursquare is extremely popular among consumers, small and midsized businesses are still behind the curve in leveraging the platform to better understand conversations about their business,” the spokesperson says. “By accessing venue pages through the HootSuite dashboard, SMBs can now use Foursquare as part of a larger effort to become active on social media, engage with customers and market their business.”

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Social Media For Small Businesses: How To Harness The Hashtag (INFOGRAPHIC)

You've seen it everywhere: on TV advertisements and billboards, on Twitter and Facebook, on ironic T-shirts and baseball caps. You may have even heard a cheeky millennial say it out loud.

But the humble hashtag (#) isn't just a fad. In its true iteration — as early Twitter users truly intended — it served as a way to carry on a conversation with a diverse audience.

Today, the hashtag represents a golden opportunity for small-business owners to send a message across multiple platforms — quickly.

We've partnered with American Express OPEN for an in-depth look at how to harness the power of social media to build your business. With one simple hashtag, you can drive brand recognition, improve reach and engage in a give-and-take with your customer base.

Here's how.

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20 Best Applications for Small Businesses

In today's ever-evolving technological world, more and more small business owners are adopting the exceptional management tools and applications to run their business from their fingertips. If you are starting up your business, it's no surprise that choosing from thousands of apps can be an overwhelming task. But the MDX team have designed a comprehensive infographic guide called "The best small business apps", in which they've put together 20 top tools including paperwork, sharing communication, security, software and other clever apps to help small business get started.

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• Orignal Article Here

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• 7 Reasons Why Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Needs Help

A Guide to WordPress for Small Businesses

Why Use WordPress?

Whether you're looking to use it for your small business's main website or as a blog, there are a couple of reasons to consider using WordPress. WordPress is a free and open-source blogging and content-management system being used by more than 18% of the world's top 10 million websites. It's a favorite amongst beginners and experts alike for various reasons: it's free, customizable, powerful, and easy to master.

WordPress makes sense for small businesses because you don't need web design or programming experience at all. Pretty much anyone can create a website on WordPress; however, there are a lot of options and roads you can take.

Before You Begin: Everything You Need to Know

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

The first thing you need to know about WordPress is that you have two options:WordPress.org and WordPress.com. WordPress.com is more for beginners since the platform hosts the blog for you, gives you analytics right on the service, and is pretty hands-off overall. You sign up, you get a yourbusinessname.wordpress.com URL, free themes, and you can get started right away. WordPress.org, on the other hand, is for the more seasoned blogger who needs full power to tweak and customize every aspect of the site from media to HTML. WordPress.org does not host your site for you, they only give you the software to build and run your site. If you want to use WordPress.org, you need to sign up (and pay for) a web-hosting service like BlueHost or HostGator. You can find out more about the differences between these to on their official page.

WordPress.com Free vs. Premium Versions

For this blog post, we'll focus on WordPress.com (WordPress.org guide coming soon), which has two versions. Once you go to sign up, you're offered the free and Premium versions. Before you make a decision, let's walk through the differences:

• Domain name and mapping: If you choose to go with the free version and you want to use your own domain name (something like mybusinessname.com instead of mybusinessname.wordpress.com), you will have to purchase domain mapping on WordPress. Once you've purchased the domain name on a registrar like GoDaddy.com orNamecheap.com, WordPress (free version) will charge you #13 to use it on your blog. On Premium, WordPress does this automatically and you can also purchase the domain right when you sign up.
• 10GB Space Upgrade: All WordPress blogs come with 3GB of space for files and images. With Premium, you get 10GB extra plus the ability to upload audio files.
• No Ads: This one is very important. WordPress.com blogs will have banner ads on them. It's the trade-off you get for not paying for the Premium version. It's not a huge deal, though. You won't have ads 100% of the time and they're not that big, but if you care about having a small to medium-sized banner ad at the bottom of a post, then consider Premium or WordPress.org.
• Custom Design: With Premium, you can change your fonts in your theme, color schemes, and CSS. Pretty much, you have more ability to control your esthetics. If you're looking to have 100% control of things like this, then skip Premium and go for WordPress.org.
• VideoPress: Simple: do you want HD video on your blog or not?

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How to Make Your Small Business Grow Faster

The online environment offers many opportunities to small businesses. Opening new locations, reaching out to new markets, establishing partnerships, promoting your products and services, all of these can be done online faster, easier, and at a significantly lower cost than in the real world. There’s a lot of competition online, it’s true, but on the Web the gap between the big and the small is not as great as out there.

Start by Building a Nice Shopfront

Your website acts as your online shopfront. Even if you don’t sell products or services directly through it, people will still want to check it to see what’s new and to find out more information about your existing offerings. The design of your website is crucial, and a San Francisco Web design company can help you with that. The design acts as the foundation of your website, and if it’s bad or dull, it will have a negative impact on the SEO, social marketing, and advertising campaigns that you undertake online. 

Get Inspired

Nobody can give you a step by step guide to growing your small business, but you can let yourself be inspired by a few ideas that worked for others.

• Turn your website into an e-commerce one that directly sells products and services. While you focus on local customers, you can serve those in other districts or cities as well. This of course depends on what you’re selling. You cannot deliver donuts to another city, not effectively anyway, but you can certainly deliver pond equipment or computer hardware. Consider using professional San Francisco web design services to make the conversion.

• Use social media marketing effectively, focusing on the massive segment of mobile users, as these are particularly interested in small, local businesses. Maybe it’s time to hire a marketing expert? 

• Make sure you appear in Google Places and other local small business directories and that your location and phone number and email address are always updated.

• Offer regular discounts and promotions through email newsletters, blog posts, and social media websites. This is a strategy that, if well implemented, can work wonders.

• Sell complementary products or services. Are you a car dealer? Maybe you have a mechanic that doesn’t do much work. Why not hire another mechanic and start offering a local auto service solution? No need for costly print or billboard advertising – use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and other social websites for promotion.

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4 Things Small Businesses Must Understand About Social Marketing

Social marketing is not just for big companies. It’s a practice – a discipline – any business, of any size, can jump into.

But that doesn’t mean all social marketing strategies are one-size-fits-all. For small businesses – typically resource-strapped and charged with carrying out many tasks at once – there are some very basic essentials that deserve particular attention.

As we put together The Small Business Social Marketing Workbook, we uncovered four essentials for boosting sales and customer engagement.

1. You Need to Know What You Want

Every company should set realistic goals for social. But if you’re a small business, where time and attention are stretched, not knowing what you want to get out of it can shut you down before you’ve even started.

Before you launch a Facebook campaign, or start tweeting incessantly, ask a simple question: What are the key objectives I want to accomplish?

Do you want to boost engagement for your in-store promotions? Are you out to build a bigger base of fans or drive up subscriptions for your email newsletter?

Take the time to figure out the two or three most important goals, and jot these down. They’ll help determine when something is working or if it’s time to change direction.

2. Figure Out Where Your Best Customer Is

Chances are you can easily picture your best customer. They’re the type to visit your store or site again and again. You can cite the age range, the location, maybe even the income level.

Now, can you name the social network most likely to draw in this ideal customer?

Understanding the various demographic – and geographic – pulls of different social networks will help you focus your efforts in the right place. This could be determined by size (Facebook is huge), location (Twitter does particularly well in urban centers), age and gender (Pinterest is particularly strong with women), or your product (Instagram naturally makes sense for snap-happy foodies).

Take the time to investigate which networks where your best customers congregate. It may be more than one, but fight the urge to be everywhere all at once.

3. Know the Difference Between Social Ads and Social Campaigns

In an older age of media, you simply paid to have an ad slapped onto a newspaper page or in between TV segments. But with social media paid, earned and owned media are converging.

That means small businesses need to know social marketing means more than purchasing ads on Facebook and Twitter. You need to build and engage your audience, keeping them active and connecting to their peers to make your ads successful.

Social campaigns are the best way to do this. A social ad is a paid placement for your copy, tweets or posts. A social campaign is where you make a coupon or offer available for fans or for sharing your content; it’s concepts like photo contests, caption contests and video contests where users create the content themselves; and it can involve hashtags, which integrate your campaigns across social networks and even across various marketing channels.

Social ads and social campaigns work well together. But it’s important to know the difference between them. 

4. Make Social a Part of Your Week

The last essential for small business is perhaps the simplest, but hardest to carry out. You need to make social marketing a regular part of your week.

This doesn’t require blowing up your week. It’s about fitting in the various tasks required for sustained social success in a natural way. It could involve 30 minutes coming up with campaigns one day and another 30 minutes analyzing results the next. When and where is not as important as making an actual schedule. Because if you simply wait until you have a free moment, you’ll quickly fall behind. And nothing is less fulfilling than an out-of-date social account.

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Small Business Guide to Social Media Mastery [INFOGRAPHIC]

There are companies like Apple who have incredible brands, fantastic advertising, and great products that drive marketing through their user community. Apple doesn’t need to be active in social media to survive and flourish. Other companies are at the opposite end of the scale, with customer service and customer satisfaction issues. Avoiding social media may be a good strategy until they can fix their processes and products.

But, for the company that wishes to capture market share, build authority, build influence and grow their business, social media is a low-cost, high effort means of doing so. I say high effort because it does require time and dedication from you and your team to produce content and provide value to grow your audience and build out a community. This is especially true of small businesses which don’t have the monetary resources to ‘buy’ the advertising necessary to grow.

Social media has become vital to a small business’s marketing plan! The persistent question is: “how can your business get the most out of social media marketing?”. Find out in The Small Business Guide to Social Media Mastery, a brand new infographic brought to you by MarketMeSuite and Placester!

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