Small Business – Take a look at Social Media
posted in content syndication, enterprise RSS |
A report from eMarketer shows that 260,000 small businesses in the US and Canada are using some form of social media in their marketing activities. That’s only about 1% of all small businesses in those two countries.
Yet there are many stories of how small businesses that are involved in social media are getting great results. Even local businesses.
One is Boston Court Theater in Pasadena, CA. They are interested in building a community of art and theater lovers in the Pasadena area and they’ve used sites like Twitter to build that support. They tweet the back stage “insider stories” that let people get a glimpse into the world of the theater. They’ve built up a loyal following of over 600 local folk.
Another is Naked Pizza in New Orleans. Reuters reports that this small company has 4,300 followers on Twitter and a recent online promotion brought in 69& of their business on that day. They’re now seeing a sustained 20% of sales volume coming from their social media marketing.
There’s an excellent post about how small businesses can use social media at Search Engine Land
They suggest:
- Start a blog
- Comment on other blogs that talk about your industry or subject
- Get active on Yahoo Answers
- Make and share videos
- Take and share pictures
- Try the social news aite StumbleUpon
- Find and join relevant groups
4, 5, & 6 are particularly good ideas. However, if you want people to share your content you have to make it easy to do so. That means #8 should be ‘add your content to feeds.” Feeds are the blood vessels of the social web - they keep all this content flowing.
Make it easy to socialize your content so that people can save and share it.