Small Business Going Social – Tread Lightly

The current rage—the whiz-bang, change-the-world way to market your business—is social media.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, you could spend your entire day being lured into it all. And there are many bloggers and business consultants out there touting the big benefits to social media. They’ll tell you that if you’re not using social media, you’re missing the boat.

There certainly are benefits to social media, but let’s be clear—its not the big solution to the problem that is paramount in your mind—How the heck do I drive more traffic, close more deals and make my business thrive?

That’s not to say that some small businesses aren’t successful using social media tools to help market their businesses. The New York Times recently published a story about a few small businesses using Twitter to alert people about deals, specials, etc. And, I know of a few small businesses here in Colorado that are using Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with customers. Here’s the thing though: All of them have a web site where they are hoping to drive traffic to. They use social media as one way to drive that traffic.

Here at Kutenda, we do that too. In fact, we get a good amount of traffic from Twitter to our blog.  I say good amount, not fantastic. It’s consistently just under 5 percent as a referral source. Contrast that to traffic coming from Google, Yahoo and Bing—the result of searches on our key terms—that’s over 30 percent of our visitor volume.

What does that tell you? Still the #1 way for people to find you is using search.  So, if you have limited resources—both money and your time—the biggest bang for your marketing dollar is still search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising (PPC).

Should you try a social channel? Sure. But if you’re going to do it, think about what you want to achieve first. Ask yourself some questions to steer your strategy about what might work for you:

• Is your audience far and wide, or do you just want to touch your local market?
• Do you have the time to dedicate to daily interaction, or are you more likely to do something once or twice a week?
• Do you have a good way to make connections online that will delight people and not make you look like a spammer?
• Do you have interesting things to communicate?
• Are you naturally helpful?

If there is a Social Media Club or Social Media Breakfast in your area, check it out. You’ll meet other people who are experimenting and find our what is and isn’t working for them.

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PHOTO CREDIT: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0