Top Social Media tips for small businesses

In a nutshell, social media is the online trend for small businesses searching for that extra mile in their advertising campaign. However, this can be dangerous territory if you aren’t really comfortable with the tools available at your expense.

Take a look at our tips below, and hopefully you will be in a better position to exploit the social media market for your business.

Blog
Your company blog is the primary starting point of all social media success. As the driving mechanism for attracting website traffic, your site SEO can immensely improve with regular content. User-generated content is highly engaging, and produced regularly and becoming in-demand, you will soon obtain regular subscribers to your RSS feeds.

Social Networks
There are millions of them out there, not all containing the right audience and appeal for every business. The main attractions are Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but not all of them offer the marketing platform your business needs.

Facebook demands highly interactive and regular content flowing through a fan page. In comparison, Twitter is an easy tool for establishing followers, for whom to advertise your content to in the hope of being distributed further. Linkedin remains the more corporate of the three, creating an ideal location for marketing the profile and individuals of your company.

Multimedia
User-generated content such as videos and graphics are the most popular type on the web. Content needs to be engaging to ensure users return, but also redistribute. Virals have become a driving point for many marketing agencies looking to ‘spread the word’ of a brand. Adding essential characteristics such as humour and controversy will ensure the message reaches a larger audience.

This can be achieved using a brand channel within YouTube and feeding content through the company blog so that the content can be easily distributed via your RSS feed.

As the first instalment of a two-part post for social media, we will reveal essential tools for monitoring social media to ensure desirable brand reputation is maintained next week.