How to Utilize Social Media Marketing (SMM/SMO) for small businesses!

Writing your Content?

How do I find the time?
OK, so if you’re wondering when I have time to write and digg and stumble upon, I don’t. If you are a larger company you may have the resources to hire a copywriter to write your own web 2.0 material. However, if you are small company or a one man shop you have to utilize your time wisely. So, the search engines don’t like duplicate content, right? Well, here is how to get around that… You could write a generic post with everything you want to say in it.

Make your links SEO friendly. Make sure your content is relevant and compelling. Copy it and paste it into each of your social media opportunities and then tweak it. Change things around a bit. You should change 20% at the least, just enough not to be considered duplicate content. Then publish it for indexing. Depending on how fast you write, this all could take up to an hour or two after you set up your accounts.

Ultimately, you have to make the time, but trust me, it won’t be a waste. All together, after every thing is set up, I spend about 2 hours a day maintaining it all. This includes updating photos, blogs, myspace and linkedin, as well as participating and sharing.

Make yourself popular!
On all of your blogs you should have the links to all of your social media endeavors so people have the option of sharing it with others. Click here for the code and tutorial to add the Chicklets feature to your blog. You can also customize the code if you know how, to include your LinkedIn account if you have one. If you can’t or don’t know how to modify the code then you can manually add a LinkedIn button at the end of each post (this is best for blogs).

Participation is the key to making social media marketing work. Say you are searching the internet and find something you really like, you should SHARE IT! If there is no button to share the page then submit it yourself. Digg is good for this technique because it’s easy and fast to do. You can also submit or Digg your own stuff as well. You can send out shouts to all your friends so they can see what you like and get friends to dig your stuff or recommend you in your LinkedIn account. Basically, you should try and take full advantage of what these sites have to offer and you will see results.

Not only will you build brand recognition for your company, but for yourself. People get to see you’re a real person who wants to share valuable knowledge.

Will it drain my budget?
Aside from taking up some of your time, the answer is no. All of these web 2.0 or social media sites are free. They just require your time and opinion. Actually, people who blog a lot are starting to turn it into a way to make some good money. If your blog is being found and people are reading it heavily on a regular basis you could really make some good money via paid advertising such as Google Adsense. But that is a whole other topic. Maybe that will be a good topic for my next post.

REMEMBER!
Post responsibly! Don’t be spammy or you will get buried. Also, each social media site has it’s own set of rules so read them so you don’t get yourself kicked off. To make sure you are utilizing these sites correctly with proper SEO techniques sign up for our Free SEO tip of the Day.