3 Ways Your Business Will Benefit from Social Media Marketing

Social media sites have been around for about 10 years now, but it really was only about 6 years ago that people started to use them for marketing. Social media has exploded in the past year as marketers realize the benefits of social media for marketing.

The 3 reasons why your business will benefit from social media marketing platforms (SMM) from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn:

1. Cost effective marketing: SMM is much a low cost/no cost way for you to gain additional online exposure. There are opportunities to advertise on social media sites as well, and the cost is much lower than traditional advertising and much more targeted that traditional and online ads.
2. Link Popularity: At Google - the search engine where everyone wants to achieve top rankings, it's all about links - particularly incoming links from other popular sites. By uploading compelling, engaging, informative content on popular networking sites like Facebook, you can increase the probability of people linking to your content from their pages or websites. These quality links earn more respectability and trust for you, and that often means higher ranking on search engine results that lead to more clicks to your site.
3. Quality Secondary Traffic: Web sites with content that's related to yours may link or post your articles on their site. This is a strategy that many Web site marketers use to add value to their site for site visitors. These same marketers may also "tweet" something they see on your site. This all drives a secondary source of traffic that also may increase your site popularity with Google.

Not everyone feels ready to take on social media marketing - mostly because they don't know where to start. Attending a hands-on workshop or getting help from a social media expert will help you get started and keep going.

Click here to get the latest small business social media marketing tips.

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Personalize Your Facebook Address

As of midnight, June 13th, Facebook members have been able to register personal Web addresses for their personal pages. This is an effort to help people find people better and to create more memorable Facebook addresses. Before, member addresses were long (and not business card ready) and included numbers and symbols. Now, the address can look more like this: facebook.com/carolsanger (that is my real personal profile) instead of this http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Beverly-MA/The-Web-Division/188185830499 (my business fan page). No way that long address is going to fit o my business card.

Now, I am more interested in having one for my business page, and I can do that ... as long as I have more than a thousand fans. I'm thinking that won't happen for a while, after all I'm not a top publishing company or brand. Perhaps Facebook will change that rule before I achieve the 1,000 mark. It might happen, and I remain optimistic about that eventuality.

Most of the people I know don't have a thousand fans either. However, you can still do this for your personal profile. When you arrive at your Facebook home page there will be a message at the top of your wall with a link. Just click on the link, choose a name that's available and you're set to go.

I followed those steps and then received a link to do the same for my business page, but the page got stuck and I couldn't get the link back. I refuse to give up. I'll keep searching for a way and will post to this blog when I get the answer I'm looking for. Until then the line between my personal and business Facebook pages will be blurred.

Twitter Law

Since I first signed up for Twitter, I noticed that there were a number of celebrity accounts. Many of those accounts were set up by other people - other people not even associated with the celebrities, also known as "fake celebrities". You know, sites like "hugh_jackman" (aka: the Fake Hugh Jackman which is acceptable) instead of "RealHughJackman" only they claim to be the real deal. I always wondered how people could get away with this, after all, isn't this essentially stealing someone's identity?

A great example of this practice is the recent law suit by Tony La Russa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, against Twitter. A number of fake tweets were made in La Russa's name; apparently they weren't bad tweets but one did state something questionable and Mr. La Russa didn't like the fact that inpersonators were making any tweets in his name.

The Twitter gang claims that they've been on to this, and that the law suit wasn't necessary, but as a result of the legal action they're now requiring a verification process for celebrities, professional sports stars, government agencies and more. I hear that during the verification process, several accounts have been closed because the person/s who set them up did so under false pretenses. However, this is still in what they call an experimental phase.

According to Biz Stone, a founding father of Twitter, The experiment will begin with "public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well-known individuals at risk of impersonation. "

I'd like to see this happen for businesses as well. We all need our identities protected. Otherwise, someone can start a twitter account that looks like a "real" business and say all kinds of things - for good or for bad. And it's the bad I'm concerned about. Social media and online reputation work hand in hand and each business needs to know if there are other twitter accounts with their business name as well as the comments that are made by others. The main objective is to uncover negative comments and respond quickly to them and this reputation management is and will continue to be a challenge as long as others can freely post whatever they want, true or false, online. (This is a topic for another post and article.)

Twitter plans to offer the verification process for other not-so-famous people in the future, but it's not clear when that will happen. According to Biz Stone, they hope to eventually verify more accounts but that due to the resources required it will start with a small group and potentially grow from there.

What does this mean to us, the small business owner? The larger companies will most likely be verified before we are. Therefore, we need to be proactive. Search twitter for your own name and your business name to see what you find. If there's someone else out there tweeting under your name, report it to twitter right away. Twitter has closed down accounts in the past and I'm sure that they will take complaints seriously.