Web 2.0

Most small businesses appreciate marketing strategies that are low-cost or no-cost, especially in today’s unpredictable economy. Online marketing channels such as web sites, e-newsletters, email campaigns, and internet advertising are already being used by small businesses to save money on marketing, since these tend to be much less expensive than some older, more traditional methods. But with the popularity of sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, small businesses are finding yet another marketing strategy that not only saves them money, but is also very effective in getting the attention of customers and the search engines alike - and that strategy is social networking.

1. Keep Customer Mindshare
It used to be that small businesses purchased newspaper or magazine ads, and used billboards, radio ads, or direct mail campaigns to keep their name in front of customers and potential customers. But today, these methods have not only become very expensive, they also lack the flexibility necessary to target audiences with a message meant exclusively for them.

Today, customers are using the web everyday. They use Google to find information, Facebook to share information with their friends, Twitter to stay in touch with others during the day, and they listen to downloaded podcasts on their iPods. By having a solid social networking presence, a small business can easily meet the needs of its customers; whether it’s announcing relevant news in a Facebook profile, broadcasting special offers to followers on Twitter, or showing up at the top of the search engine listings so customers click on their web site link first (before visiting any competitors’ sites!).

2. Develop Customer Relationships (and Loyalty!)
Today’s customers really do expect some level of online interaction with your company; whether they are using your company’s blog (or other related blogs), following your Tweets (on Twitter), writing product reviews on sites like Amazon.com, or posting questions and information on sites like LinkedIn. The more you can provide customers with a way to interact with your business, the more supported they feel, and the more positive their experience and attitude becomes. Be sure to also follow the “conversation” by using tools like Google Alerts to monitor how your business is being presented and talked about on the web.

3. Build Inbound Links
Building organic inbound links to your web site is the most effective way to improve your rankings in the search engines, especially in Google. Most social networking profiles allow you to include links to your web site, which then become new inbound links that point to your site. Depending on the social networking site, you can sometimes use your keywords as anchor text in your profile, and direct these links to specific (optimized) landing pages on your web site. Not only will these organic links help you gain points with the search engines, they can also help drive sales and boost conversion rates by bringing users directly to the landing pages on your web site.

4. Increase Visits to Your Web Site
It’s pretty logical - the more exposure your business has on social networking sites, the more customers and potential customers have an opportunity to click on links to your web site. If you can also provide good quality content, useful information, and other helpful resources in your profiles, you can often create enough interest (or maybe curiosity) to get users to visit your web site - users who would not have otherwise had any exposure to your business. Just make sure that you create specific landing pages on your web site that are relevant to your social networking visitors, rather than just sending them to your home page.

5. Rank Higher in the Search Engines

By providing multiple sources of quality, indexable content on various social networking sites on the web, your online visibility is expanded, giving the search engines more content to discover. Search engines routinely index not just web pages, but also blogs, images and photos, video, wiki entries, podcasts, and social networking profiles. When you provide great content in a variety of forms and in a variety of places, you improve your chances of getting noticed (and ranked higher) by the search engines.

As social networking continues to gain in popularity, small businesses are finding ways to take advantage of it to connect and communicate with customers. In the past, reaching customers was often an interruption - a commercial on TV, an ad in the middle of a magazine story, or a billboard on the side of the highway. But social networking provides a way to interact with customers and engage in a two-way conversation with them. Of all the marketing strategies available to small businesses today, social networking seems to provide some impressive benefits for little or no cost, which may be the greatest benefit of all.

If you haven’t yet realized that social networking is now the focal point of internet marketing, then you haven’t been paying attention. Utilizing social networking is more than creating a group on Facebook or opening a MySpace account. A business owner who truly understands social networking has a gift for taking a broad view of the internet. Where do people gather on the internet? What do they talk about?

How do they talk to each other? The difficulty with using social networking as a marketing strategy is that social networking requires marketers to step outside of their comfort zones and find new ways to deliver their messages. It doesn’t require a total rejection of traditional marketing techniques, but if you’re unwilling to follow your gut and build authentic relationships, then it might not be right for you.

Potential customers are constantly bombarded with marketing messages in some form or another. What they really want is to make authentic connections with other people, which is why social networking is such an overwhelmingly popular phenomenon. To be successful, you have to make those connections instead of simply throwing your message out there to see where it sticks. In fact, if you’re using social networking the right way, you might not even feel like you’re “marketing” anymore.

Here are 7 keys to building authentic communities on the internet:

1. Create of map of your customers. Keeping your niche market in mind, find the places on the internet that have the most influence on your potential customers. What are your potential customers and your competitors talking about? Does your company have anything to add to the conversation?
2. Recruit. Now that you’ve figured out where your potential customers are and what they’re talking about, invite them to talk with you. 3. Determine the appropriate platform(s). Which of the following will work best for your goals: social networking sites, e-communities, blogs, or reputation aggregators?
3. Engage your community. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is the place where you have to put your most authentic self out there and engage the people you’ve recruited to be part of your conversation. Be real and be genuine. Make this about a conversation, not about selling something. Mostly importantly, find a balance between content generated by your users and content generated by your enterprise.
4. Measure involvement. Watch your community carefully over time and pay attention to what resonates most with them.
5. Promote, promote, promote. Your site may not need much promotion. If that’s the case, then consider yourself lucky. But if you find that you need to promote yourself, go seek out places where that can happen. Invite yourself to someone else’s place and then invite them back to yours.
6. Give incentives. Once you have a quality community, focus on giving people a reason to stay. Be aware of what works and what doesn’t, what people enjoy and what they don’t. Always look out for ways to make your community more friendly, useful, convenient, and rewarding.

The most important part of marketing through social networking is to make sure that your community adds values to its users. If your users feel like they’re getting good advice, good information, and making good connections, then they’re more likely to stick around. And it’s your job to facilitate a quality community. It may not feel like marketing, but it may be some of the most important marketing you ever do.

If you’re not sure whether now is the time to make social networking part of your overall marketing strategy, go ahead and take the plunge. Climb the learning curve now, ahead of your competitors, and build your communities. You’ll be glad you did.