7 Social Media Marketing Tips for SMB

Looking at how successful big companies are with their social media marketing efforts, it’s not surprising to find small businesses becoming more and more interested to jump in to the bandwagon. However, small business owners often worry that they don’t have as much a budget for social media marketing as the bigger companies do.

The good thing about social media marketing is that you have a sea of free alternatives to choose from. Budget should not be your biggest concern, but rather time. You need to set aside time to do the things you need to do.

Anyway, here are some simple social media marketing tips for the budget-constrained small business:

Start with Facebook

This is a great site to start working on marketing from. Facebook has millions of users who may stumble upon your brand and become potential customers. You can choose to get a Business Account or use your personal account to make a business fan page for you account. Just make sure to put in some extra time to study how your competitors are using Facebook and pick up some tips on what to do with your brand’s own Facebook page.

Tweet it!

Twitter is yet another great social media site to build a presence for your brand at. Take the time to learn the ropes of posting in Twitter, as well as study how people are using keywords relevant to your industry to search for content. Also, you may want to download 3^rd party software that will make keeping up with tweets and posting your own updates easier for you.

Get blogging

Blogs give you a place to share remarkable content at. If you have some cash to spare, registering for a custom domain for your blog is best. However, if you’re not, you can make use of free blog hosting sites to put up a blog on. Set up a regular blog posting schedule. Post thrice a week at a minimum to make sure the blog stays fresh in your viewer’s minds. And always be on the lookout for what people in your niche are interested in reading. This makes coming up with topics to write about a whole lot easier.

Don’t forget to participate

Visit other niche-related blogs and don’t forget to share your thoughts on their posts. Just remember to always be insightful when you comment. Add something of value to the table when you comment. This helps add to your reputation, not to mention increase the chances of someone visiting your link because of your comment.

Tune in to what’s being said about your company

Free tools like Google Alerts can be used to signal you when something new comes up about a certain topic you put on watch. In this case you might want to put your company name as a keyword along with a few of your competitors.

Google Analytics, yet another free tool from Google, will provide you with detailed information regarding site traffic. This can be very helpful to determine whether any of your social media marketing efforts are paying off or falling apart.

Sure enough, sites like Facebook and Twitter have their own search functions that can help check if people have mentioned your brand on their respective sites.

Go multimedia

Venture into other media aside from plain text blogs. Use photos, videos and podcasts to share content. Sites like YouTube and Flickr are both helpful tools that are free for your brand to use.

Combine social media tools

You’ve noticed that a lot of social media sites have integrated their services together. A great example would be Twitter and Facebook. Save time on posting by activating cross posting options in such sites. Another good example you might want to try out is with LinkedIn and WordPress. Once you activate the cross post option, you can see snippets of your recent WordPress blog entry on your LinkedIn profile.

Social media offers a lot of benefits to small businesses out there. Investing time into learning social media marketing strategies, however simple they may be, will pay off in the long run. So don’t put off adapting social media marketing strategies for later.