Question by Suz: How can I incorporate social media into my small business marketing effort?
What are some ways to use Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to spread the word about my business?

Best answer:

Answer by Luis
Social Media can be a great way to generate traffic to your business. But just like email became flooded with spam, social media sites can develop the same problems.

Social media sites are not about pitching your wares. Its about connecting with groups of people who have similar interests, are looking for useful information,being a fly on the wall, and keeping up on the latest events.

That being said The less you “Sell” and the more you inform the more money you will make. You haven’t detailed what your business is, but what ever it is I would become ( or find someone who is) an expert in the field of what you do, to create valuable content (articles, videos, how-to’s, top 12 mistakes, exposes, behind the scenes etc) that are big attractors for your market.

For example if you sell Shoes, be not just an “expert” about shoes but also be an expert on feet, and joints, nerves, pressure points, back pain etc. and create content about those topics and how they relate to shoes.

“How to relieve the 7 pressure points on your feet that cause those nagging migraines you have everyday.”
“Trying to get rid of those last 5lbs? You might be wearing the wrong shoes. Take this quick test to find out now”

Explain to people that you are always finding new and interesting shoes and that you update twitter a lot and that’s the place to get the latest on what you are up to.

Ethically bribing people with your content in exchange for them following you on twitter is an option, but making sure you actually provide them with interesting, funny, quirky, actionable knowledge and experiences is what social media is all about.

The content you make, create a buying criteria and if the people viewing your content agree with your buying criteria they will also accept who you are and what you are selling.

Also make sure you invest maybe 20 min a day finding interesting stuff in your field but not specifically about you that your followers and friends would be interested in. figure for every 8 or 9 posts about other interesting things you find, you then post one about something you are doing.

Hope that helps you out.

Add your own answer in the comments!
Effective small business social media marketing strategies

Social media marketing has proved its worth for all kinds of businesses around the world. Social media marketing is done with the help of social networks like Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. The social media marketing is one discipline of marketing which is gaining popularity amongst media marketers around the world with every passing day. The various advantages of social media marketing strategies have made them even more popular amongst the small businesses.

The very first advantage of a social media marketing strategy which attracts small businesses towards it is its budget-friendly nature. Social media marketing strategies are cost-effective and suit the budgets of all kinds of businesses. Social media marketing campaign is cheap to prepare and very cost-effective to execute. Some of the social media marketing tools are available even free of cost, and the others are available for a price much less than any of the traditional media mark©”? Autols. This ad?/a> of so%CQ?fww.r3Fng.ia marketing strategies has made them extremely? N?idt amongst the small businesses with li?oughvertising budget across the globe.

The second advantage that makes social media marketing a crucial ingredient for advertising campaign is its extensive reach. The social media marketing is capable of targeting a wide base of target audience in one go. It means

Great information on marketing with social media

Question by Robert: What is the best way to tack results with social media marketing?
How does a business owner track their results? Are there tools or software that can show true return on investment numbers to meashure their social media? Example: Google Analytics is one great tool to identify online traffic by impeding a code within your website or blog. What other tools are on the market?

Best answer:

Answer by Steve
I use Google Analytics as a baseline approach. It gives you a lot of information. The other one I like is Quantcast.com. It gives me all sorts of weird information, such as 9% of my visitors are African American. How they arrive at that number I have no idea.

A better answer to your question is here though:

http://mashable.com/2009/04/19/social-media-analytics/

The basic answer is to Optimize your existing analytics software using plugins or built in tools.

Give your answer to this question below!
The Future of Internet Marketing and Social Media

Social media sites have revolutionized the way online businesses market themselves and their products or services. Tapping into a community which often is predisposed to your particular brand, product or service has led to increased visibility and sales. The viral nature of some social media sites, like YouTube has also increased brand awareness. As we move forward, the tools and techniques we utilize for our social media campaigns will continue to change. The future of internet marketing and social media is bright.

Perhaps the biggest change for social media marketing will be incorporating social media directly onto business websites. Allowing members to post videos, comments, pictures and more will become more commonplace. Other popular social media tools such as sharing will continue to become a large factor when developing websites and media campaigns. We are likely to see ‘memberships’ on business websites. Much like popular social media sites such as FaceBook and Twitter, businesses may be making the leap towards fully incorporating social media directly on their sites.

Businesses will continue to utilize the popular social media sites as a part of their advertising campaigns. In fact, they are likely to begin to designate more time, effort and even funds towards developing strong social media campaigns. For example, many

Great information on marketing with social media

Question: Can Social Media Marketing replace Search Engine Marketing as a viable way for companies to market online?
I “Stumbled Upon” www.FtheBigThree.com which does a good job of showing the opportunities that could be available for marketers in the “Social Media” category. Not completely sold yet on it but kinda warming up to it. I guess I’ll have to start learning SMM to go along with my SEM and SEO. So, many abbreviations….so little time.

Best answer:

NO — they can work hand in hand, but social media marketing cannot replace search engine marketing

Search engine’s usage is far way more than social media use. Plus traffic from search engines are more sustainable and longer term, while social media traffic is more sporadic.

If you get a top placement for a keyword in Google, for example, you can expect that to continuously give you traffic until someone else topples you from the top spot — and that is not always easy to do unless you made a huge mistake or the search engines changed their algorithm.

You can get a huge burst of traffic from social media sites such as Digg — only if your link is in the homepage. Once your link is pushed to the archives, traffic dries up.

Social media sites depend on the FRESHNESS of the information, while search engine sites depend on the RELEVANCE of the site to the search query and that gives an edge to older pages

For a savvy marketer, he/she needs to utilize and maximize both venues to get the most traffic. The two should work hand in hand, and not one over the other.

What do you think? Answer below!
The Future of Internet Marketing and Social Media

Social media sites have revolutionized the way online businesses market themselves and their products or services. Tapping into a community which often is predisposed to your particular brand, product or service has led to increased visibility and sales. The viral nature of some social media sites, like YouTube has also increased brand awareness. As we move forward, the tools and techniques we utilize for our social media campaigns will continue to change. The future of internet marketing and social media is bright.

Perhaps the biggest change for social media marketing will be incorporating social media directly onto business websites. Allowing members to post videos, comments, pictures and more will become more commonplace. Other popular social media tools such as sharing will continue to become a large factor when developing websites and media campaigns. We are likely to see ‘memberships’ on business websites. Much like popular social media sites such as FaceBook and Twitter, businesses may be making the leap towards fully incorporating social media directly on their sites.

Businesses will continue to utilize the popular social media sites as a part of their advertising campaigns. In fact, they are likely to begin to designate more time, effort and even funds towards developing strong social media campaigns. For example, many businesses have

There are three reasons why a business might decide to use YouTube as part of their overall search engine optimization strategy:

1. Popular YouTube videos appear at the top of Google search results pages alongside standard website listings so it’s quite easy to understand that if you have a popular video in YouTube, titled with your relevant keywords, then it could get you an extra spot in Google search results alongside your main website. The downside is that this traffic will go straight to YouTube so you have the job of ensuring that the video viewer knows your website address and decides to go and visit it for more information. In a way this isn’t an SEO benefit to your site, more a way of grabbing an extra position and keeping a competitor off of the search results.
2. If you create several videos and your own keyword branded YouTube channel to house them all, then you can benefit from the placement of a back-link to your main website on your channel page. However, creating YouTube videos just for the benefit of an extra back link to help your search engine optimization probably isn’t a good use of your time and money unless you know you can create a fantastically popular video channel that everybody will link to – and boost the channel’s Google PageRank score.
3. Google likes YouTube embedded videos in content – don’t ask me why this is, but Google seems to give web pages that hold embedded video content a higher position in the results. Bizarrely this means that you don’t need to create the video but simply embed useful videos that you find relevant to your audience into your website. Of the three reasons for using YouTube with SEO in mind, this is probably the most effective and requires the least amount of effort. Of course the ideal is to combine all three ideas and embed your own YouTube videos into your web pages.

Optimizing your videos within YouTube itself is something quite different but does impact on ‘1’ above – since only a popular video makes its way into the Google results. Therefore you need to consider the following factors when uploading a new video:

1. Make your video informative, interesting and snappy ( 5 minutes or less).
2. Give it an optimized title (using your target search terms and website name) e.g. How to save money on car rentals – car-rentals.co.uk.
3. Optimize your video description. Include keyword based informative content in the description (more info) of your video and link to your website from it – ideally do this in the first line – to appear in the main YouTube descriptor.
4. Ensure that your keyword tags are relevant and contain most of the search terms you used in your title and description. As with SEO try and avoid keyword stuffing.
5. On your main website aim to create hyperlinks to your YouTube video URL containing keyword-rich anchor text.
6. Watermark the video with your URL and use an interesting freeze frame shot.
7. Create and customize your own YouTube channel using search terms to create a keyword friendly URL. Consider the creation of multiple channels for multiple niches.
8. YouTube’s internal site search factors in other rules including the video’s rating, total views, how many times the video has been favorite. The age of the video is also a factor because new videos tend to appear more highly to keep YouTube looking fresh.
9. Ask all your friends to vote and view your video, share it on your Facebook profile page to help with video ranking.
10. Post your videos towards the end of the week, weekends are YouTube’s busiest days (for a B2C audience anyway).