Social marketing for Small Business

When you’re growing your business you want to trade on your good name, your great products and services and your loyal customers.  If your customers appreciate the way you do business then they are more likely to recommend you to their friends.

How do you go about making use of your customers in a social setting?   We’ll go over a few top tips and tricks for marketing your business.

Facebook Page:  If you haven’t created one already then you can create a free Facebook page for your company.  This is a public placeholder for your business on Facebook which allows your friends as well as members of the public to see what your business is doing, what offers are available and your latest products and services.

Take to Twitter: Twitter is a great way to get instant feedback from your customers and advertise to the whole ‘Twittersphere’ (302 million active users at time of press).

Google ranking:  Creating articles on your website that get naturally (or organically) ranked by Google is a great way to drive traffic and therefore hopefully sales to your website to get across your message.  Google ranking is based essentially on the number of ‘back links’ to your content i.e. other sites linking to yours.  One way of generating back links is to encourage people to write about your products or services and then link to your website.

Creating a website with a custom domain: You can easily create a website for your business on a domain such as wordpress.com.  Many online businesses start this way and it’s also possible to buy a custom domain (i.e. youcompany.com)  and then have this domain point to your wordpress.com site.   Having a custom domain with your business, product or service name in it will help your brand get ranked higher in Google and other search engines.

Google Adwords: Google is a company that is built on advertising revenues.  They can position your search results at the top of the side bar, but for frequent high placement ads with popular search terms you will pay more money.   Adwords can be a great way to drive traffic to your website but it can also be an expensive option.

Facebook advertising: Facebook ads are perfect for easily targeting specific market segments.  You can easily choose to either promote your Facebook page or a selected post in order to bring your message to specific geographic locations and age ranges of people.  Facebook advertising has been shown to be quite effective in clearly targeted campaigns.

Twitter cards:  Twitter uses what it calls ‘cards’ to promote your business.  You can create cards for products, for services and even apps and they can be ‘deep linked’ to your digital content.  Can be complicated but once again can be targeted at specific market segments to maximise your reach.