A recent New York Times article by Mickey Meece entitled Small Businesses Are Taking Tentative Steps Toward Online Networking highlights the incredible opportunities that can be created for small and medium-sized businesses by using social networking.
While I am a firm believer that now is the time to focus more effort on becoming effective marketers, I also understand that budgets are tighter. Technology in the form of social networking offers many fast, effective and free methods of attracting new business to your company.
We began using social networking services (LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook) to promote Aries in mid-2008. Our experience has been that being active with these services results in dramatically increased search engine optimization (SEO), greater exposure to the community and heightened credibility with our customers and prospective customers.
Yes, these services are free from a hard cost perspective. However, they are only valuable to your customers and prospective customers if you actively maintain them and if you provide valuable content in them. One of my favorite ways to make sure that we remain active with social networking services is to contribute to this blog on a regular and frequent basis. All of these sites have tools to allow you to update them from your blog. The idea here is to make the majority of your changes in one place and have those changes automatically updated to many different services.
Social networking, when done properly, is a great way to move from the traditional and rapidly-becoming-outdated outbound marketing model to an inbound marketing model. In other words, by providing valuable content through these services, customers will be attracted to you. This is a much more effective marketing model than sending out direct mailings and placing print/radio/tv ad’s and it’s certainly much less expensive.
Sage also realizes the importance and power of social networking. They recently launched www.sagespark.com to offer free social networking services for small businesses. Rob King, VP of strategic marketing at Sage North America, puts it into perspective: social networking is here to stay and those businesses who take advantage of it will be successful.
Any of our customers who would like more details about how they might be able to apply social networking to their business, feel free to give us a call. It’s one more advantage to our unlimited support agreements.
And if you would like to keep up with what we are doing with social networks, you can connect with us on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/johnfshaver), follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/john_shaver) or check out my Facebook profile (www.facebook.com/johnfshaver). Regarding Twitter, I always follow anyone who follows me.
