This is part 2 of my series on what every small business needs to succeed in 2010 (see Part 1 : A Dynamic Website by clicking here). In this post, I will discuss how having a sound social media strategy is vital to ensure a small business’ social engagement with their community and therefore their ongoing growth and success.
I have previously published a post about really believing in a social media strategy and not just adopted one because you think you should. This is still very true but we should take a step back from that and see what constitutes a sound social media strategy for your small business.
So firstly, which social media platforms are appropriate for your business? When I do comprehensive social media audits for small business clients, this is one of the first things I look at. What is the business’ target market? What is the person responsible for the social media strategy going to be able to cope with in terms of functionality and time allowed, and lastly which social media platform ‘fits’ that small business and their brand most suitably.
Which of these platforms best suits your business, your target market and most importantly, best suits you?
Facebook has become the most important social networking site in the world very quickly and has just topped 400 million users worldwide. It is also the number one referrer of new clients for my businesses. It is the most popular social networking platform in Australia, with more than 5 million users in 2009. In fact, globally if Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populated in the world, ahead of the USA.
Facebook enjoys widespread popularity in the small business community because of the functionality of using Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups and Facebook Ads to grow your brand awareness online as well as target your market very specifically through utilising the information that people share on their Facebook Profiles.
Twitter is the biggest mover and shaker in the social networking world right now and is another free site that has helped my websites’ readerships increase dramatically in the last year. In Australia, Twitter had one quarter of a million people join up in the first few months of 2009. That represents a growth of 1067% over the previous year.
Twitter is a way for individuals or businesses to keep people up to date with what they are doing currently. These are called ‘tweets’. Each tweet can only be 140 characters maximum (the similar number originally allowed for SMS’s on mobile phones). So how long is 140 characters?
“This sentence is 140 characters, it’s not that many but it’s still enough to get your point across, you just have to be succinct & focussed.”
The possibilities with Twitter are endless and its only drawback is that you need to be very regular in updating your status to keep you front of mind with your followers.
For a great introduction to using Twitter to grow your small business, check out my e-book, “34 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started on Twitter”.
MySpace
MySpace was one of the very first social networking platforms and both Facebook and Twitter owe a lot of their structure and success to it. Almost half of MySpace users are under 25 years old. MySpace’s females outnumber males in Australia and less than 19% of users’ income is more than $100,000.
Some businesses are still quite suited to engaging their target market on MySpace: bands, artists, performance based businesses, and those whose target market is teenage through to early 20′s.
Linkedin is like Facebook or MySpace but for business people. It’s often referred to as ‘Social Media for Grown-Ups’.
This free service is all about building a network of users who can recommend you to others and also relies heavily upon you keeping your status up to date (similar to Facebook and Twitter).
One of the more useful parts of Linkedin is Linkedin Answers. Similar to Yahoo! Answers, this part of the site allows you to ask, and more importantly answer, questions of the entire network.
Check out my previous post on Social Engagement for Small Business using Linkedin: An Interview with Iggy Pintado.
YouTube
YouTube is one of the internet’s and Web 2.0 great success stories. The user numbers of this video sharing platform are staggering. 13 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. To watch every video on YouTube would take you more than 412 years. There are more than 500 million videos viewed on YouTube every day and it is always one of the ten most viewed internet sites int he world.
It’s also now the world’s second largest search engine, behind its owner, Google. This is a pretty powerful tool that your business should be taking advantage of, particularly because it’s free!
Check out my previous post on Social Engagement for Small Business using YouTube.
FourSquare
In a lot of ways, FourSquare represents the next generation of social networking. It combines the standard fodder: friends, followers, reviews and status updates with geographic and location-based features.
Users ‘check-in’ at different locations around a town or city, update their following where they are and what they are buying or doing and leave a comment or suggest a tip for others when they are in the same place. It sounds really geeky but until you use it, it’s difficult to really grasp how powerful this application could be.
And why do I think it’s the next best thing? Before Twitter became mainstream (before Oprah and Britney) it was widely mocked and laughed at as being solely for the ‘nerdarati’ and FourSquare is currently enjoying the same sort of derision.
Which platform suits you best?
They are just six of literally hundreds of social networking platforms out there today.
The thing to keep in mind is that which one best suits you and which one best suits your business is no less important than which one of them best suits your target market. A sound social media strategy integrates a little bit of a few of them without putting all of your eggs into one basket.
If you would like to see how I can develop a sound social media strategy for your small business, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.
In your experience, which platform has best suited your business. Are there some of them that you would like to try but haven’t yet? Please let us know in the comments below.
