Getting Your Small Business Started With Social Media

Getting Your Small Business Started With Social Media

As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you probably know that it’s a good idea to get started using social media but may be wondering where and how to get started. In this article, I’ll be going four steps that will help you establish your business with a social media presence and get a good, solid start reaching your target market, creating a community and engaging with your customers. It’s important to plan out how you want to approach social media to ensure that your efforts are efficient and effective. STEP 1: Goals, Branding and Target Audience Your business has goals and your social plan should too. It’s also a good idea to identify your branding objectives to help guide you in creating your social media plan. Tie your branding objectives to your business goals. If your goal is to gain more customers, then one of your social media goals would be to increase your visibility (let people know you exist). Another goal would be to use social media to engage with your customers to give them a sense of who you are, what you do and what your business offers. Your social media presence will be a reflection of your business so it’s important to think about the tone you want to use for your social media posts, the images you use and the ad campaigns that you run. These will be the parts of your social media presence that will leave an impression with your audience so you want to have some planning and strategy behind. Your social media channels should also work together with your other...
Quick Pinterest Tips for the Small Business Owner Part 1

Quick Pinterest Tips for the Small Business Owner Part 1

Pinterest now has 70 million users, are you one of them?  If not, here’s why you should; the Pinterest Pin it button is on more retailer’s sites that than the Facebook Like button. Pinterest is definitely here to stay and a force to be reckoned with and utilized to sell your product, your service, etc. If you think about it, Pinterest IS best for product based businesses. Users look up a product, like a kitchen table, tons of pins come up, they find one they like, the posts might even include a price on it and by clicking on the image it takes them right to the business webpage where they can order it. In fact, pins with price tags included get 36% more likes than those that don’t. More and more users are signing up daily on Pinterest. The average user is female and on average spends about an hour on the website. Let’s get going with some basic tips. 1. Set up a business account. Join as a business if you plan to use it to sell products. If you already have an account that you’ve been using for your business but isn’t defined as a business on Pinterest, you can convert it as well. 2. Determine if your website is pinnable. Do you have any pictures/images to pin? If not, get some. 3. Get the Pinterest Pin-it button on your website, or the a Follow button or Board Widget. One benefit of getting a Board Widget on your website is you can entice people to follow your boards from your website. 4.  Get to know your audience. Who are you pinning...

Assessing Your Social Media Needs

As a small business owner or solo entrepreneur you are faced with the on-going challenge of how to market your business. Very few small businesses have unlimited budgets available so any funds spent on marketing really need to be effective in landing additional sales or leads or ultimately have some value to the overall growth of the business. Right now using social media for marketing is on fire. Everywhere you go, people are talking about how your business MUST be using social media to get the word out. Just recently, leading social media professionals have said that  businesses and companies who are not using social media within the next 3 to 5 years will not survive. So how do you figure out what’s the best way to spend any of your budget on social media marketing for your business? There have been many times that I have spoken with potential clients who want to know how I can help them. They know that they want to use social media (or at least they have heard that they should be using social media) but they are not quite sure how to do that so they do a search for a social media assistant.  But then, they aren’t quite sure what to say about what they need help with other than they want to be active with social media. Here are my top five tips for how to determine what you want help with and how much help you will need to do it. 1) What are your goals for using social media? This is usually the first question I ask...