August 12

Social Media for Small Businesses

Let me start off by stating that I’m not a marketing person. I have no desire to be a marketing person and in fact, I personally can’t stand sales and marketing in general! Now all that said, I’m a complete social media junkie. I’ve got accounts with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare and I’m sure when the next cool thing comes out, I’ll probably jump on that bandwagon too! What I’ve learned about these sites is that while most of them are for personal use, business owners can and should take advantage of the tremendous reach of these sites.

Let’s take a brief look at each of these tools and how some businesses are taking advantage of them.

Facebook

Aside from it being in the top 5 most popular websites in the world, Facebook is primarily used as a way for friends to keep in touch with each other. However, over the last 2 years, businesses have been creating fan pages as a way for them to interact with their customers. The interactions that businesses have with their customers tend to be casual and let them see that while they’re a business, they are people too. You can check out Thrive’s Facebook Page at: www.facebook.com/staplesnetworkservices.

Twitter

People tend to use Twitter in different ways. It was originally designed to be used via text messaging as a way to tell your followers what you’re doing right now. Personally, I don’t typically use it to tell the world what I’m doing; what I do use it for though is to follow my favorite businesses, sportswriters and news outlets. I generally know what’s going on in the world immediately for this very reason. Follow Thrive Networks on Twitter at: twitter.com/thrivenetworks.

I like to think of LinkedIn as “Facebook for Professionals” in that I have a different set of people that I’m connected to on this site. In particular, I use LinkedIn to keep in touch with business contacts. When we’re hiring, I often post it on LinkedIn as it’s a fantastic way to find new employees.

Foursquare

This is one that has a lot of potential with retail businesses and the food service industry. The premise of Foursquare is that it uses the GPS in your mobile device to determine your location and it overlays that information with the locations of businesses near you. Once you find the location that you’re at, you can “check in” at that location. This allows the businesses to get to know the demographics of the people that visit them the most. The person with the most check-ins at a business, becomes the “mayor” of that location. So what does all this mean for the consumer? Well, I’ve seen a couple of restaurants offer free drinks to the mayor of their location when they check in. It creates a bit of a competition among members to keep going back for more. On a personal note, my wife and I are always battling to see who can become the mayor of different restaurants!

While many businesses prefer that their employees stay off of these sites while they’re at work, they are actually important for many businesses as they allow an incredible amount of reach to their audience.