Social Media for Small Business

This is a submission to the Small Biz Discovery Contest and part of our commitment to serve the small business community with quality Internet marketing resources. This article answers the question “What one recommendation would you give to small business owners to improve their online presence?” focusing specifically on social media marketing. It is part of a group of contest submissions sharing Internet marketing recommendations for small businesses. Public voting for the contest is now closed. Winners will be announced July 2, 2010.

Author: Chris Harmon Category: SMM

The first thing you have to realize when using social media is that you can’t just delegate it to the youngest person on your staff and assume you will connect with your customer. If your customer is following you, they are going to need to feel they are interacting with someone near the top of the company food chain.

Ask what you want to get out of social sites. Think about how you would use these tools before you ever sign up for that Facebook page. Think about the companies you do business with and what they could do to get your attention in social-space. Write down a plan and be prepared to adjust it in a month. Keeping in mind that your social efforts must meet a need to be successful.

Realize that people don’t use a blog, Twitter and MySpace to find a gas station. Simply regurgitating facts and statistics about your business isn’t going to fill up those follow lists. Much like sky-writing isn’t appropriate for every business, neither is every type of social media.

Understand that participating in a social network takes time and you need to make time for it everyday if you really want it to succeed. My favorite restaurant takes the time to tweet their specials everyday about an hour before lunch. They are injecting themselves into my awareness in a very subtle way. It is a much better use of social space than a blog or Facebook. It pops up in my Twitter feed at the perfect time. The other side is that what is in that tweet needs to contain something that interests me. Twitters brevity and informality helps in this case, they can’t waste a lot of space on anything but stating their specials in a short-hand that is usually reserved for friends. It comes across like someone doing me a favor rather than a sales pitch.

Don’t expect miracles. Social networking won’t make the phones ring overnight. If the message isn’t well planned, it may never make the phones ring. If adding a blog to your site sounds like a great idea, look at your numbers of visitors first. Let’s assume you have a housewares site. If you get 100 visitors a day to a part of your site where you sell your bacon handling devices, it is unrealistic to assume you will see 1,000 people a day reading the blog about bacon in that area. Of that 100 visitors, you might get 1-2 readers of the blog. Suddenly you need to promote your bacon-blog and do so in such a way that you aren’t spending time and money that could produce tangible results. Promote from within the channels you are already working in. Add a blurb about the blog in your emails, receipts, and site. Readers are bad at magic tricks, they rarely show up unexpectedly.

Once you get your business in a position where it makes sense to move into social media, look before you leap. Are there fans of your products talking out there already? It makes better business sense to support their efforts on your way in. If you find a fan of your company with a large network of followers, there’s nothing wrong with the head honcho giving them an honest “Thank-you” for their support. It validates the devotion and feelings they have for your company. Too often companies take those fans for granted. Think about your fans in terms of a relationship, is the road going both ways? A social network is not a replacement for a website. Keep your website up-to-date. A broken or non-existent site will have a lot more trouble convincing people to find you in social-space.

Communicate honestly with your network. If you have a product that you aren’t sure you want to carry, bounce it off the network and see what they say. Be prepared to develop a thick skin, there are people out there that live for controversy and drama. If you find yourself in a ping-pong match with a disgruntled customer, end it with an invitation to speak to you in person. Often anonymity makes for a less social interaction. One of the hardest seems to be owning your mistakes. It isn’t the fall that hurts, it how you handle yourself afterwards that people will remember.

Sometimes your employees will say things about you. You understand that your employees aren’t always skipping into work. They have bad days, they have good days. The socialization they do online is the same one they do face-to-face. How you respond to them griping about what a rotten day they had can put you in a position of looking like an overreacting big-brother. Head off trouble with a clearly worded policy that covers how discussing internal processes and identifying personnel are off-limits, but that you understand sometimes people need to vent. If you really want to have fun, give them suggestions about giving people pseudonyms with examples. Turn the issue around with frank discussions about how people make mistakes and that everyone will make a mistake, however having another employee discuss it would  be inappropriate. People have been griping about their bosses since the first caveman told the second to pick up a rock. It’s seems to be a universal truth that people gripe about their bosses sooner or later.

About the Author

Chris Harmon was in the printing industry from age 11 to about age 29, as his mom used to say, “It isn’t child labor when they are your own kids.” Chris switched to IT in 1995, and was shown a web browser on his first day. He wrote his first web site about a week later and an ecommerce site within a month. Chris was the very first web developer/master for the Coleman Company (yes, the camping gear people). He spent two years convincing them they wanted a site and the next 8 years running it. Afterwards Chris spent two years as the web manager for gourmet food purveyor Dean & DeLuca during the revamp of their old circa 1997 site that had a back end from 1985. He jokes that you needed a time-traveling DeLorean if you wanted tech support. Currently Chris is co-owner of Ecommerce Mechanics – a web programming and web management service bureau that provides technical services to graphic designers and small businesses.

See Contest's author page for links to connect on social media.