Top 4 Sites For SMBs Navigating Social Media
by Lisa Barone
I know. You don’t care how important the so-called “experts” tell
you social media is. You’re a small business owner and that means
you’re busy. You don’t have time to be everywhere or to try the “next
big thing”. Luckily for you, you don’t have to. If you’re a small
busin
ess owner you can still use social media to find new customers
without letting it take over your life. And below you’ll find what I
think are the top social media sites to help you do that. The trick is
navigate through the clutter and find the ones that will work best for
you.
There are a lot of Question/Answer sites out there, but Yahoo
Answers stands out due to its impressively large user base and its
ability to put you in contact with folks asking service-based questions
broken down by location. For example, there’s a guy in Boston looking
for a painter, someone in New York City looking for a wedding dress
shop and a guy in San Jose looking for recommendations on a new car.
Those are all opportunities for small business owners to reach out and
respond to targeted service queries. You just have to know they exist
and how to find them.
Yahoo Answers is also valuable for businesses where your expertise
is what you’re selling. By going in and answering questions that
benefit the community, you brand yourself as an expert in that
category. If you’re looking for a guide to Yahoo Answers, look no further because Matt McGee has already written the book on it.
It’s hard to talk about small business and social media these days without
mentioning Twitter. Twitter is about conversation. It’s about finding
the people talking about you and what you sell and forming
relationships with them. One of the most underutilized aspects of
Twitter for most businesses is the Advanced Search
feature that allows small business owners to search for specific
keywords located near a particular zip code. Companies have used it to
ward off customer service complaints, to answer questions and to create
an awareness that you’re not only an expert, but you’re an expert in
their local area.
For example, say you run a day camp and are looking for summer labor. You can perform a search for [summer job near:02116 within:25]
and find folks located 25 miles outside of Boston looking for a job for
the summer. There’s even a sentiment feature that attempts to determine
if they’re happy about not having a job or sad, so you know which users
to go after. There are many, many ways to harness the power of Twitter for local businesses, you just have to know where and how to jump in.
A blog is a powerful sales tool for small businesses because it acts
as a differentiator between you and your competition. Your small
business blog will not only act as a customer service and educational
tool, but it will encourage customers to interact with you, will be
crucial in crisis management, and can even help you pick up rankings
for keywords you’re not targeting with the rest of your site. A lot of
businesses lose out on customers by failing to establish a point of
difference or personal story. Your blog enables you to do that. It’s
your space to show your customers who you are, to listen, and to
connect with them on a more personal level. As far social media outlets
go, creating a blog is often one of the best investments you can make
to boost your business and retain and attract customers.
Flickr provides an avenue for small business owners to find
customers with product-based needs (different from Yahoo Answers, which
targets service-based needs). By going into the Groups
section and searching for your particular area, you can find a list of
groups that deal with topics either related to what you do or parallel
topics that may share a common customer base.
For example, a search for Boston may reveal a group of car lovers
looking for classic car parts or a gem in perfect condition someone’s
looking to sell. A local group for photography may be seeking
recommendations on new camera types. You should try to join the groups
related to your area to help monitor the conversations and find places
where it makes sense for you to join in. To make this task easier,
subscribe to the RSS feed so that you’re automatically updated once a
new discussion topic is added. You can also use Flickr for new content strategies.
Other Notable Mentions for Small Businesses:
- GetSatisfaction: A hub for small businesses to address customer service issues head on before they become larger problems.
- YouTube:
Create product demos, how-to videos and engage customers in a way that
separates your company from the herd of “me toos“ out there.
- LinkedIn:
Create a profile for both yourself and your corporation and take
advantage of the Question/Answer feature similar to Yahoo Answers.
- Facebook:
Offers strong demographic targeting options both in the advertising
opportunities (very high conversions for local businesses!), as well as
with corporate Fan pages.
Social media remains a cost effective way for many businesses to
reach out to customers. Because of your small size, you can create more
targeted, more manageable online communities that convert both online
and off. The trick to tackling social media is not to be everywhere,
but to instead be everywhere your customers are.
Source: http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/04/small-business-social-media.html