Confused? What Social Media is best suited to your small business?

Social Media best suited to your Small Business

Small businesses can often feel over whelmed with the amount of social media sites available to them. They all guarantee to help you make a success of your business but the difficulty lies in trying to find out what ones are best for your business. I have picked three social media platforms, LinkedIn, You Tube and Pintrest to talk about and to give you examples of how you can use them to help raise the profile of your business.

LinkedIn

According to an Article on The Wall Street Journal http://goo.gl/6lkEa six out of ten small-business owners say that they believe social-media tools are valuable to their companys growth. Professional networking service LinkedIn topped their poll with 41% respondents singling it out as potentially beneficial to their company.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with millions of members. According to LinkedIn they can help a small business with the following:

• Establish your professional profile and control one of the top search results for your name.
• Build and maintain a broader network of professionals you can trust.
• Find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates.
• Learn about other companies.
• Leverage powerful tools to find and reach the people you need.
• Tap into the knowledge of your network.
• Discover new opportunities.

As Social Media platforms go LinkedIn is one of the easier sites to set up a business profile on and more importantly maintain that profile. LinkedIn have provided the small business with a dedicated page for small businesses called “LinkedIn’s Timeless Guide to Small Business Success”. A small business owner will find a number of videos broken down into six episodes with the aim of talking the small business through LinkedIn’s advantages and how to make the most of LinkedIn’s assets and use them to their advantage. http://learn.linkedin.com/small-business/episode-1

YouTube

YouTube is not just used by the younger generation anymore. YouTube is the 2^nd largest search engine after Google. Over 128 Million people in the US and over 800 Million people globally visit YouTube at least once a month. http://goo.gl/OWgl6

According to an article on www.mashable.com there are a number of best practices that a small business should adopt when using YouTube:

Don’t expect your Video to go viral – There are about 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute! Do not expect your video to go crazy on YouTube but it is important to make sure that you are trying to reach the right customers.

Buy some Ads – Since your video is probably not going to go viral it is a good idea to consider buying some ads on YouTube. Rates are favourable against Google AdWords. It is important to make sure that your content is relevant to your search term. Google will base the ad’s position on that relevance.

Testing – If you are a large business using an ad agency they will probably want to use focus groups as a way to measure the success of the video. As a small business owner this form of measurement may not be available to you but there are other ways of measuring your video. There is a technology called Hot Spot and this will let you see when people are tuning in and out of your video. Google Analytics will tell you how much referral traffic you are getting from YouTube.

Get watching videos! – Do your research and watch videos on YouTube and set yourself a goal of beginning to recognise the good ideas.

Pintrest

Pintrest.com has created a lot of buzz in the US and according to www.comscore.com it is working its magic in the large EU Markets as well. Since May 2011 when it started to reach the minimum reporting standards for comscore.com the growth rate for visitors has been in the double, triple and quadruple digits.

The fastest growing market for the social network between May 2011 and January 2012 was Germany, where visitors to the site spiked by over 2956 percent, and in January 2012 the site had 67,000 unique visitors. Pintrest grew nearly 80 percent in the UK and by some distance it was the largest market for Pintrest.com with 245,000 unique visitors in January 2012. Between December 2011 and January 2012, visitors from France and the UK decreased slightly but engagement on the site rose by 1740 percent and 20 percent respectively. http://goo.gl/6Luz4

How can Pintrest.com benefit you as a small business?

The good news is that Pintrest.com have just launched their brand new web analytics. This means that small business’s can now gain some meaningful insight into how their audience is engaging with their content. Pintrest relies on a visual medium and it only allows its users to post images of interesting things.

Here are a number of Pintrest tips to promote your Small Business

Start by getting unique images – simple but beautiful images and pictures should capture what your business is and what your business offers.

Describe your pin – your images should have a description. Try to include a keyword or two to ensure that your page ranks for the right product or service.

Create many boards – Create as many boards as you want. You can have many different themes and creative and fun ideas to pull in your viewers. Walmart the Supermarket chain is a prime example of this as it has 73 boards based on food, clothing, recipes etc.

Focus your boards – It is a good idea to have about 10 to 25 boards with a minimum of 10 pins on each board. A consistent board with frequent pin updates will keep viewers coming back.

Last of all be Social! Pintrest is a social media website and that means that you need to network with other viewers. You can do this by following viewers boards, repining their images to your board, commenting on them and liking them. Of course if someone repins your images, don’t forget to thank them!