St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing

Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are catching up to traditional websites as a marketing mechanism for small businesses. That’s the takeaway from a just released survey of 2,000 small businesses by research firm Internet2Go. That could be bad for Google (GOOG), which has a virtual monopoly on small-business online advertising, and for Adobe (ADBE), which has a real monopoly on software tools used to build websites.

According to the survey, which ran in mid-September 2009, 45 percent of small-business owners have Twitter or Facebook accounts. That’s astonishing considering that today only 44 percent of all small businesses have websites, according to some surveys. Remember, the Internet is over a decade old, but social media is really only two to three years old, if that.”We’ve known anecdotally that small businesses are using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but these numbers are surprising,” says Greg Sterling, an Internet2Go senior analyst.
What’s going on here? First, the survey covered small companies that are active online, so they’re more likely to be early adopters. But I believe something deeper is happening. Plainly put, social media offers most of the benefits of a website with few of the headaches.

Business owners can easily float offers on Twitter that are quickly searchable. They can also easily interact with their customers and spot trends that could be useful in marketing. Facebook’s small-business users can build a fan page that provides most of what they get with a standard brochure website, but at a tiny fraction of the typical $500 cost. Contrast that to building a website. You can either do a very cheap one that costs $50 to a few hundred — and looks like it. Or you can pay at least $2,000 to have a designer build one for you that’s really good and includes a minimal amount of functionality.

Then you need to deal with a content management system to update the site, hosting costs and other time-sinks. “biggest complaint” small businesses had regarding online marketing was that it was “too costly” (26 percent). In the survey, 80 percent of the companies reported having marketing budgets of less than $5,000. Of course, the difficulty small business has with traditional websites is no secret. Google, Local.com, MerchantCircle and numerous other companies offering online marketing services to small businesses provide simple online placeholders that contain key company information and can serve as landing pages for online ads.

That said, 90 percent of survey respondents also had their own websites. Also, respondents didn’t claim to be overly satisfied with social-media marketing mechanisms versus other types of online marketing.

And a competing survey by Citibank found the opposite result: that small businesses are largely uninterested in social media. (Of course, that was a telephone survey, and you know how Twitter and text users feel about actually picking up the phone.) Therefore, the jury is still out.

I personally think that verdict will come in shortly — and social media will be a big winner. In doing research into Facebook advertising, I tracked a small but growing number of small businesses that were skipping websites entirely and going exclusively with Facebook, Twitter or some combination of the two for online marketing. Others just put up blogs rather than websites and used that as their web presence.

In fact, Sterling himself is a case study. He became self-employed several years ago and started to build a website. He had problems finding a designer he liked at a price he was willing to pay, so he launched a generic WordPress blog instead. Now that blog has become a key part of his online presence, and Sterling has no interest in building a site that costs a lot upfront and requires serious care and feeding.

So what does this mean? For Google, which has long held a hammerlock on Internet advertising, this could mean far more competition for marketing dollars as social-media marketing grows in acceptance and begins to encroach on text-based search advertising and display-based contextual advertising.

Google beat Wall Street’s earnings estimates on Thursday and wowed analysts with 14 percent year-over-year growth in search-based advertising. But that growth is very low compared to several years ago and suggests a rapidly maturing market in Google’s search-ad stronghold.

For companies that make software tools to build websites, such as Adobe, the message could be even more dire. The death of the pretty-but-useless brochure website may be close at hand. That means less work for Web designers catering to small busineses and less demand for Adobe’s expensive site-building tools. But for small businesses, it creates a more level playing field and lower barriers to entry to online publicity and marketing.

Alex Salkever is Senior Writer at AOL Daily Finance covering technology and greentech. Follow him on twitter @alexsalkever, read his articles, or email him at alex@dailyfinance.com.

Coming Soon! Twitter to Launch Lists Feature

Nick Kallen @nk from the project lead on twitter lists reported that twitter is testing a new feature with a small subset of users.
Their idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends etc.

The Lists would be public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you create are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

A Benefit for St. Louis Small Business Owners: Twitter Launches List Feature

The Twitter platform team started working on this feature because of the frequent requests they received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter. Of course, that means not just twitter.com—the Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into their favorite Twitter apps.

They’re just doing limited testing for now. But once they’ve tested the feature out a bit, they’ll launch it for all accounts!

I love sharing other posts from some of the most brilliant minds in social media marketing. Samir Balwani is one of those people!
Enjoy this great article, the original can be found at: http://mashable.com/2009/09/30/small-business-strategies/

5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

September 30th, 2009 | by Samir Balwani

Samir Balwani is an emerging technology strategist at Morpheus Media, a firm specializing in Social Marketing, SEM, and SEO. You can follow him on Twitter @leftthebox and get his newsletter.

Social media marketing and the businesses that utilize it have become more sophisticated. More small businesses are beginning to understand how to best leverage online tools to build a community and recognize that engagement and interaction are the foundations of social marketing, but most don’t know what’s next.

What follows are five advanced strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next.

What Is An Advanced Strategy?

The definition of an advanced social strategy is a technique that goes beyond the normal social media presence. It introduces or reinforces a marketing message while pushing a user to another profile or business site. Before moving forward with an advanced strategy, it’s important that your business understands social marketing, has experience engaging consumers, and that you possess a basic understanding of online marketing.

Strategy 1: Multimedia Usage

The term “A picture is worth a thousand words” has never been truer. Consumers are now using the web to look for product pictures and videos; they want more information and want to see what they’re considering buying. The good news is that it’s easy for a company to create and publish videos and pictures.

In addition to taking photos of products, you can also take pictures at office events as a way to highlight company culture. This not only helps convince others to work with you or to buy from you (consumers see that you are down to earth and one of them, instead of a stuffy company), it also helps your HR department recruit new employees. Who doesn’t want to work for a company that celebrates birthdays and has a good time?

Videos are useful for explaining complex how-tos or concepts. Showing step by step directions can have a greater impact than even the most well written article. Businesses don’t have to invest huge sums of money to create good videos, either. I highly recommend the relatively cheap Flip camcorder, which takes great videos and is easy for even a non-technical marketer to use.

Multimedia can break down the faceless business-to-consumer sales flow and make your company appear friendlier. Use videos and images to show that your business is fun, you care about your employees, and most importantly, that you care about your customers.

Example: WorldMusicSupply.com

WorldMusicSupply.com, an online retailer of musical instruments and accessories, has used YouTube (YouTube) to build a strong online community. Their channel has built over 7,000 subscribers and has over 260,000 views.

Strategy 2: Integrate Offline and Online Advertising

Many small businesses do some sort of offline advertising, whether it be radio, print, or cable. Social marketing allows a business to extend their offline sales pitch.

Including your Facebook Page or blog URL in offline ads act as social proof, inviting potential consumers to see your community and increase trust in your business. Not only can integrating online and offline advertising help the conversion process, but it can also help build your community. Introducing potential consumers to your social profiles means they may join your community now and buy later.

Strategy 3: Message Adaptation

As businesses start to become more sophisticated with social media they are starting to leverage more online platforms. However, most deliver the same message over multiple platforms instead of tailoring communications for each individual site.

Social platforms each have an ecosystem of their own. What might be acceptable on Tumblr (Tumblr) might be considered spam on Facebook (Facebook). A specific style of writing might spread on Twitter (Twitter) but fail on FriendFeed (FriendFeed). Understanding that each site is different and then customizing your message ensures they do well on each respective site.

Not only does customizing messages across sites help the message spread but it keeps users from receiving multiple identical communications. Be sure to maximize your potential by sending a user that follows the business on Twitter and Facebook two different messages, instead of the same thing.

Strategy 4: Local Social Networks, Beyond Yelp

For a small business, local search can be a big win. Being visible to consumers looking for a business in their area is extremely important. Make sure your site is included in local business directories in order to help ensure that consumers find you when they need you. Sometimes finding that many sites can be difficult, however.

First, make sure you check your competitors. Where are they listed? Check their inbound links to check for business directories you can add yourself to. Also, make sure your business has been added to Google Maps (Google Maps), using the Local Business Center.

Take the time to include all the information you can and update any old news. For many consumers, this will be their first interaction with the business.

Example: Bella Napoli in New York

Bella Napoli is a small pizzeria in New York that has done a great job of making sure they appear in as many local searches as possible.

Strategy 5: Contests and Discounts

Building a community is only the first part of social marketing. Using that community to drive sales, propagate marketing, or crowdsource operations is the true power of social media. One way to excite the community is to collectively do something to create a contest or offer an exclusive discount (i.e., the contest can create competition between users). Not only does a contest build buzz organically but if contestants need to, for example, publish an article that gets the most comments in order to win, the contest itself becomes viral.

A good social media contest should include some sort of sharing or virality as a requirement for winning.

Discounts are also a great way to connect with your community. By giving exclusive coupons to your social community, you’re rewarding and reminding them that you are not only a brand to engage with, but also to buy from.

Example: NetFirms.com

NetFirms.com decided to make it easier to register a domain by allowing people to do it via Twitter. Those who participated or spread the word by tweeting, were also entered into a prize drawing.

Conclusion

Creating a basic social media presence is easy enough, getting your community to actually do something is more difficult. Taking advantage of these strategies can help you build your community, make your marketing more effective, and incentivize buying.