Marketing success tips for small businesses
When one of my clients complains that business is down, my first advice has been to get busy on Facebook and Twitter.
It’s not the end all answer, but it’s quick, painless, and free – a way to get your name in front of your local audience. It tends to result in posting a special offer or something that promotes the business. While there’s nothing wrong with that … other than the obvious loss of income from price discounting … we may get better results if we have a little fun with our audience.
Get used to it, folks – social media is the online conversation of 2011 and beyond. It’s soft, but it’s strong. We’re not supposed to say it’s advertising, but if you’re not letting people know about your business, products and services online, what’s the point?
,br />Trends are like a pendulum. They swing this way for a time, and then momentum swings them the other direction. The backbone of America has been working very hard, and financially, many haven’t really reaped the rewards they’d hoped. So you get some burnout, and some casual conversation makes it all better. Pretty soon businesses catch on that they should have a presence where the people are. And they’re online BIG TIME. Cell phones, iPads – now you can Twitter from your television set.
Local businesses should definitely be taking advantage of what Twitter offers. So many local social networks are coming out of the woodwork – you may wonder if you really need all of that to stay current. You don’t. If you aren’t familiar with social media marketing, many local social sites can be trivial and useless. Twitter, however, has everything you need while managing to stay free of the nonsense you don’t.
Sign up for a Twitter account, but don’t plan on using it at twitter.com very often. The basic Twitter website lacks ease of use and the functionality that make it a worthwhile platform for local business. Instead, download Tweetdeck or sign up for Hootsuite to manage your interactions. If you’re using the Chrome browser from Google, you might also give the Chromed Bird extension a whirl.
Ordinary people, businesses and marketers use Twitter and Facebook for very diverse purposes. Some view these social networks as pure conversation portals, others as merely another sales channel, but neither extreme will be effective for the small business owner. For business purposes, online social networking’s closest kin is the local business networking event. It’s an [...]
This guy gets $1.00 for creativity! I found this on Flickr while I was looking for something else. Reminded me that it’s important to get a chuckle or two in each day to keep perspectives fresh. That’s one reason I dig Twitter. I have a pretty unusual group of followers that all have one thing [...]
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