This week's issue of Business in Vancouver featured a segment on the Small Business BC expert videos.  These short segments produced by Riiplay.tv were designed to allow some of the speakers at Small Business BC to share some bite-sized chunks of knowledge in video format - knowledge that is normally disseminated through the many seminars offered by Small Business BC.  I was fortunate enough to get a small mention as I commented on the accessibility and digestibility of these short segments for individuals who are growing their business.  If you're interested, in the full article, pick-up a copy of this weeks Business in Vancouver (BIV).

More importantly, if you want to check out the expert videos, have a look at Small Business BC's YouTube page.

The seminars at Small Business BC have been going very well with attendance up from the winter.  Recently, I delivered seminars to fairly full rooms at Waterfront Station in Vancouver joined by a number of video conferences attendees from cities like Prince Rupert, Langley, Ashcroft, Kelowna and Saskatoon.  One of the attendees emailed me asking some great questions about link building, social media sites and sitemaps.  So, instead of keeping that contained within an email, I've decided to include that dialogue as a blog post here.  Hopefully, other small business people who are starting to build their website read this and learn a little bit.

Question:  Hi Kevin! I enjoyed the seminar and learn a great deal, however, I am confused about "linking" I know it is important to build links. Am I trying to build links into our website. What about building links away from our website, is that the same importance?  I have a flickr site for images which I posted on (link) my website that takes people AWAY from our website so I got rid of it. However, it is valuable for me to link TO our website from Flickr. Should I do both? Does it matter or is one better than the other?

Answer: Yes, you want other websites to link to you. That's important. And it's OK to have the occasional link going out, especially if it's to one of your social media pages like Flickr. Just make sure that any link you have going out of your site is set to open in a new window or tab. In html notation, you link should look something like this.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/whatever" target="_blank">View my Pictures on Flickr</a>

Question:  Our website is pretty simple and really doesn't need a Site Map. You suggest we put a site map on our website and then submit it to Google to help increase google rankings. Can we submit our website without a Site Map for this purpose?

Answer: In my opinion, every website should have a sitemap. It's just best practice and makes search engines happy. That sitemap should be submitted to Google use Google Webmaster Tools. www.google.com/webmasters/tools/.  You can also submit your website to Google without the sitemap as follows. But you're still relying on the search engine spiders to click through and find all of your pages and content. For small sites, you can get by without a sitemap but it might take a bit longer to get index in Google. www.google.com/addurl/.

And as always, I'm open to learning as well.  So, if you want to add to the conversation or teach me a lesson or two, just comment below.

Small Businesses need Twitter. It’s just that simple. But in saying that, there are still a number of businesses, both big and small, that have opted not to create an account. Reasons for this range from “we don’t understand it” to “we don’t think it would add much value to our business”. Regardless of why you and your business have chosen not to participate, brands that are not on twitter are falling severely behind the curve. Here are 3 thoughts on how Twitter can help impact your small business website in a positive way:

Twitter Helps you Reach-Out to a New Audience

One message of 140 characters or less and you can reach out to millions of people. Pretty impactful stuff, wouldn’t you say? Twitter provides an easy and efficient way for your business to reach out to its consumers and gauge their interest in a new product, gets their thoughts on an existing service, and provides a forum for discussion about your company. In a world where being open and transparent is so critical to the health of your business, twitter is a great way to reach out to your followers and build your brand.

Twitter is Quick and Cost Effective

Twitter is everyone’s source for breaking information. Information hits twitter before anywhere else and goes viral before you even have a chance to comprehend it. Being able to get information out in a quick and cost effective fashion can be vital for your business. Disseminating and receiving information has never been easier and quicker, and this can be very advantageous for businesses. Add in the fact that twitter costs nothing to set up and next to nothing to maintain - a few hours a week for one of your staff members - and twitter has the potential to provide a large financial gain.

Twitter is Easy to Learn and to Use

We can talk about all the positives of twitter, but the fact that toddlers have learned to use Twitter, shows just how simple this technology is. Twitter is incredibly easy to use and does not require much if any “how to” training. Twitter also allows you to pre set your messages so you don’t have to be awake at 6am to send a broadcast message to your customers on the East Coast. You can pre-set a whole week’s worth of tweets, so you can be active on your account without having to monitor your twitter feed 24/7.

Twitter can Drive New Traffic to your Website and Sales Pages

On a more technical front, Twitter has also created an additional opportunity for you to drive quality traffic to your website, blog, YouTube content and conversion pages. This is where the true value of Twitter will be most apparent, as we are now able to very accurately measure how often a tweet has an impact, and use our communication to direct traffic to a specific action or goal on our website. Launching a new product? Announcing a discount or promotion? Why not tweet a this news, with a direct link to the order page?

What’s not love about twitter? With social media impacting business more and more, a strong twitter community can go a long way in helping impact your business in a positive way. If you would like to learn more about how social media can be optimized and leveraged for your small business, please feel free to give Yardstick Services a call. We are more than happy to help you set-up a strategy that can be easily maintained, either by us on your behalf, or in-house by your existing sales and marketing team. We look forward to hearing from you.

One of our specialties at Yardstick Services is maintaining blogs for our small business clients. Many small business owners don’t have a full understanding of why maintaining an active blog is an important aspect of their internet marketing strategy, and how vital it can be for the growth of their business. Here’s a quick breakdown as to why we think blogging can be a hit for your small or medium size enterprise:

1 - Give your Company a Face and Voice

There are many words you don’t want associated with your business, and “faceless” is definitely one of them. Having an active blog, with fresh and regular content, provides a voice for your company. This is a great way to assure your business remains pro-active in its communication efforts, and engages the public with out-bound messaging. In a world where connecting with you target audience is so crucial to the growth of your business, a blog can be an efficient and cost-effective way to achieve a healthy, positive communications strategy.

2 - Take Back Control

With Twitter, Facebook, and blogs becoming people’s quickest sources for obtaining information, controlling a message can be very difficult. Having a company blog to which you can publish knowledge and information, allows you to control your message, respond to potential issues in a timely fashion, and assures that your customer-base is getting reliable and trustworthy answers to their questions.  You’ll never be able to fully control what people say about your company on-line, but a blog can go a long way in helping you get your message out to the masses.

3 - Boost Your Traffic

Without getting too deep into the details of search engine optimization, a blog can provide fresh and unique content for your website - a major prerequisite if you want to drive quality traffic to your website. Use your blog to talk about anything ranging from new product launches to promotions, as well as highlighting your value proposition and mission statement. When you have an active and updated blog, search engines will pick up on your website, sending valuable leads to your sales pages. Increased website traffic is a surefire way to increase your company’s bottom line, cost effectively.

In a world where company’s can be judged solely on their social media efforts, a blog is a must for any business looking to grow. If you’re still unsure what a blog can do for you, please feel free to give us a call or send us an e-mail. We’d love to help you grow your business to the next level.

As the world continues to go digital, the traditional tools of business are slowly but surely becoming impractical and obsolete. Thanks to computers, the internet and a world chock-full of software developers, systems are now available that are allowing small-businesses the opportunity to replace their expensive and high-maintenance management tools with stream-lined solutions.

We at Yardstick have started relying more and more on tools that allow us to conduct our business “as usual”, without the cost and inconvenience of traditional systems. Here are a few productivity tools that we’ve been using, with gentle-enough learning curves that just about anyone can start applying them to their own business model, no matter how big or small the organization may be.

ON-LINE BACK-UP AND STORAGE

Who hasn’t lost data due to a computer crash or virus in their lifetime of computing? If you have (and I suspect almost everyone has at some point), you know the importance of proper back-ups for your data. Over the years we have seen many options, including tape-drives, CDs, and dedicated back-up hard-drives. The downside to most localized back-up solutions is that they are not 100% reliable, are high-maintenance, and you are required to invest in hardware and media that quickly becomes obsolete as technology evolves.

Introducing on-line back-up. Cheaper per-day then a cup of coffee, several providers are now offering solutions that automatically back-up and synchronize your computer’s files and data to a cloud server network. Essentially what this means is that the data you choose to back-up is stored remotely on virtual drives. Depending on how you’ve configured your settings, your data will be automatically backed-up in real-time as you work, via your internet connection. Options include multiple-users to the same folders, which is a great replacement for traditional network storage. Your critical files and data can now be accessed anywhere you have an internet connection, synchronized to multiple computers and shared amongst your entire staff.

At Yardstick we have been using a product called Jungledisk, but there are many options available. Shop around and pick the one that best suits your needs.

E-MAIL, ADDRESS BOOKS AND CALENDARS WITH GOOGLE

If you’ve ever worked in an office that was using an exchange server or other complex IT solution to manage company-wide e-mail, contact databases and calendars, then you know how much effort and cost goes into managing these systems.

Welcome to "Google Apps for Business". Unlike most Google products, this one unfortunately isn’t free. However, when compared to the purchase price of server-hardware, and the cost of I.T. support to run the infrastructure, Google’s e-mail and document sharing solution makes a lot of sense. Cost effective, and highly reliable, Google Apps is an efficient method by which to set up your whole team with an integrated communications tool. Google stores all the data and back-ups on its own network, making it accessible when, where and how you want it. If you have a domain name you’d like to use, the app will integrate this as well. No one you e-mail with will ever know the difference.

Don’t like the Gmail interface? No problem. Google’s e-mail, calendar and tasks can be synchronized through e-mail clients such as Outlook, Apple products, Outlook Express and Mozilla’s Thunderbird. If you use multiple computers in several locations, you can set up your e-mail client to leave messages on the server. This allows you to synchronize data to multiple computers from the same account, leaving your e-mails accessible to you wherever you happen to be working. No more forwarding messages to your home computer; they’ll be waiting for you when you get there.

For more information, contact Transparent Solutions (a local IT company that aids in migration to Google Apps) or check out Google’s Apps for Business page.

MOZILLA FIREFOX

I was a long time MS Explorer user, until one day I finally got fed-up with browser crashes and inexplicable error messages on certain websites. I started using Firefox, as I had heard a fair bit about it, and I haven’t looked back since. If you are a web power-user, who plays with a lot of different web-products like social media and blogging, or do a lot of your own internet marketing, then you should strongly consider switching to Firefox. Firefox is a free program, created and maintained by a non-profit know as the Mozilla Foundation.  It is less crash-prone, has excellent virus and spamware protection (when combined with AVG anti-virus), and automatically up-dates itself as new versions are released. For internet power-users, Firefox has a deep repository of add-ons and plug-ins that allow you to retrieve deeper information from websites you may be competing with, as well as productivity tools designed to make your on-line interactions quicker and more efficient.

MOZILLA THUNDERBIRD

I have been a dedicated MS Outlook user for more years then I can remember. Outlook has many great features that I’ve become accustomed to, that allow me to quickly and effectively automate routine tasks, archive e-mails for future reference and organize all my communication and scheduling needs. Recently, however, I decided it would be worthwhile to try out a few other e-mail options, just to see what other solutions were out there.

Enter Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client. From the great people who brought you the Firefox web browser, comes a sophisticated e-mail management tool with many similar features to Outlook. And best of all, it’s free! One feature that jumped out at me right away was Thunderbird’s ability to handle both POP3, as well as webmail services like Microsoft’s Hotmail or Google’s Gmail. If you work from multiple work-stations, and have server-based e-mail through work, Thunderbird will allow you to install the program on multiple computers, and then synchronize your e-mail accounts to those different computers. What this means, is that no matter what computer you are working at, your e-mail inbox and sent folder will always be matched. No more forwarding e-mails to your home address, or using webmail interfaces.

I hope some of these productivity tools will come in handy for you and your business. This was just the tip of the iceberg, as there are a variety of solutions available today, for each one of the issues listed above. No only that, but there are an infinite number of other web-based tools out there, that will allow you to increase efficiency and stream-line work flow for you and your staff.

If you have any questions regarding these products, or have a problem for which you’d like to find a solution, please leave a comment below and maybe we’ll turn it into a future blog post. But of course, you can also e-mail me directly and I’ll be more than happy to walk you through any issues you may be having.

Over the past few months, I've delivered a number of seminars at Small Business BC about how small businesses can get great websites.  Inevitably, I get asked questions about the level of results or return on investment a new website can expect.  It's a really tough question to answer because I always get the sense that the people asking this question have very high expectations based on all of the success stories that they've heard.  The sensitive response is "it depends".  It depends on your level of investment.  It depends on your market.  It depends on what your competitors are doing.  And most importantly, it depends on what else you are doing to promote yourself and your business.

Owners and managers of small and medium-sized companies cannot afford to sit with their catchers mitts waiting for their website to hand-deliver leads and sales to them.  In this day and age, with the number of competitors we all have, the ability for your website to get ranked quickly for the really juicy keyword phrases is very difficult.  And even then, as a new business, visitors may not trust the business enough to take action.  As an example, it took Yardstick Services over 6-months of commitment to content and basic search engine optimization to get on the first page for a number of "Joomla" and "Small Business" related keyword phrases...and then, that was only for the Vancouver market.  And then, even after being ranked, we didn't start to get a lot of "search engine" phone calls until we had a large enough portfolio under our belt.

Yardstick continues to get a large portion of it's business from referrals and from good ol' fashioned face-to-face networking.  So, here are the three major tactics that Yardstick has used as a small business itself that may help other small businesses in Vancouver.

Networking

Not Facebook and Twitter (although we do play in those spaces). No, I'm talking about things like the Vancouver Board of Trade, SOHO, Small Business BC, BNI, Segal School of Business Events, seminars, lunch events, trade-shows, conventions and the list goes on.  Personally, I prefer opportunities that are organized and structured specifically for networking. The Vancouver Board of Trade does an excellent job of this by providing Roundtable Events that allow you to speak to a table for 2 minutes about your business and what you are looking for.  VBOT also provides more social atmospheres with their members receptions that allow to chat in a one-on-one fashion with a drink in hand.  Both are good but they attract different crowds.  SOHO is good if your target market is small or home-based businesses.  Their breakfast events provide a chance for you to stand-up in front of the room and pitch your business.

All forms of networking require an outgoing personality and an ability to speak confidently about your product or service.  If you lack these skills, I strongly recommend joining a local Toastmasters Club.  Here, you will get a chance to network with individuals who share your displeasure for public speaking.  And you will also be forced to practice and improve your public speaking skills.  This is invaluable if you want to make your small business a success.

Referrals

Yardstick gets referrals from existing clients each month.  And, because of the aforementioned networking, Yardstick gets additional referrals from extended members of the network who know both Yardstick and one of our satisfied clients.  It's always exciting to get a referral but it really reinforces the power of networking when 3rd parties start passing our contact information around.  Thus far, we haven't had to offer incentives for referrals but we have a couple clients who's referral incentives are working wonders.  Check out Ecowest for a strong but simple referral program.

Google Adwords

I drank this Kool-aid a long time ago.  Having seen first-hand the kinds of results that Yardstick and many of our clients have experienced, I can say that Adwords works.  It's a very cost effective method of quickly capturing an online segment (or keyword phrase) that you otherwise wouldn't be able to.  Depending on your margins and average value of sale, you can get new visitors to your site for $1.00 - $5.00 per click from an ad placed relatively high on the first page of Google.  The returns can be substantial.  It's never going to be as good as the organic rankings because studies show (from an MBA class of mine) that the general population clicks on search engine ads less than 20% of the time.  But Adwords can get your small business ranked the minute you enter your credit card info into Google.  In contrast, organic rankings usually take months for the more sought-after keyword phrases...yes, months for the typical small business budget.  And some phrases such as "used car" require a level of investment that small businesses just can't afford.

Conclusion

Those are the big three for Yardstick.  And I continue to stress that a website is not the be-all and end-all of lead generation. Whatever business you are in, you inevitably face threats from competitors (online and offline).  As such, you cannot rely solely on your website to generate leads for you.  If you do, you're competitors will simply out-hustle you where it matters most...in the real world.

Feel free to look for me at the next Vancouver networking event.  I'll lend my ear for practice or otherwise.

Flash has become a very contentious piece of technology of late. This is primarily because of some decisions made by Apple to not adopt or allow Flash applications of any sort on the iPhone and iPad. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has been publicly expressing his reasoning for this decision - "Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices". If you're interested, here's the full Steve Jobs rant on Flash. So what does this mean for small business websites? Beyond Apple products, there are some thing that small business owners will want to consider with regards to developing a website in Flash.

OK so there are some benefits to Flash which I'll mention first:

OK, so now let's look at some of the things that make Flash a challenging proposition for small business websites:

Just a quick post from me this time, as this is something I've been meaning to get on the blog for a while. As a web developer, I'm always on the lookout for a fast and reliable source of image files for our small business clients' websites. Flickr is a great resource for free and commercially usable images, but trolling through pages and pages of mis-tagged files can become tedious. As a result, I often find myself falling back on the always dependable Google image search to find relevant and appealing photos.

Like Flickr though, I don't always enjoy flipping through page after page of Google images that are seemingly irrelevant to my search. Thankfully, there's a fantastic piece of browser software that makes Google image searching not only painless, but almost even enjoyable: Cooliris.

Cooliris is a browser plugin available for Internet Explorer 7 & 8, Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox (my personal favorite). While it has a bunch of cool features for web users, the "Cooliris Wall" is what can really benefit web developers and small business website owners. Instead of displaying static pages of images like Google search results that you have to click through page after page of, Cooliris creates an infinite image wall. This wall allows you to literally load hundreds of images at a time that you can quickly scroll through, zoom in and out, and download.

If you have a small business website with a photo gallery to display, you can even embed a Cooliris wall on your site and point it to your custom image content on a photo sharing site like Flickr or Picasa. This gives your site a professional finish and a great intuitive interface for your users to navigate through your images. Even if you're not a developer, it's worth checking out. Of course, seeing is believing, so I've embedded a Cooliris wall below featuring Vancouver Canucks images from Flickr so you can actually see for yourself how fantastic it really is.

It's been a bit since I wrote an article but fortunately team members Brendon and Tristan have been picking up the slack. Tristan is working on a great series of blog posts about social media.  I'm watching the metrics closely while also following the success of people like George Moen of Blenz coffee who just had a great launch party for Blenz's new protein smoothies. And Brendon has been staying true to our core conversation around Joomla and small business websites.

Today, I'm going to mention four tools that I use when I'm working with small business owners on researching keywords for their websites.  Two of the tools are external (ie. based on aggregated public data), two are internal (ie. based on metrics specific to your website and target market)...and all of them are from Google.

1. INTERNAL: Google Analytics

Do you have a website already? If so, then you should check and see if you already have Google Analytics installed because you may have internal data at your fingertips. If you don't know if you have analytics, then an easy way to find out is by searching the source code of the homepage. No, it's not complicated.  Just press CTRL+U and then click Edit ? Find and search for the words "analytics" or (if you are using the old version of analytics) "urchin".  That should take you to a few lines that say something like this:

[pre]<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-7505449-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>[/pre]

2. EXTERNAL: Google Keyword Tools

If you don't have analytics installed or you have not got a website yet, then you'll need to start with some external data.  Google provides two neat keyword tools that give you an idea of the number of searches for certain phrases each month.

Google's Original Keyword Tool allows you to type in a bunch of search phrases and see what the "Local" and "Global" search volumes are.  As far as I'm told, "Local" means all of Canada (for me in Vancouver).  The numbers are also highly aggregated so they are not exact numbers.  As such, you should use this data as indicators only for staring to focus the keywords on your site.

Google's Search-based Keyword Tool (new) allows you to type in a keyword phrase and it shows you how many people are searching for some suggested phrases (longer versions of what you typed in.  If you type in "web design" it will show you results for "web design company" and "web design agency").  This tool also shows you the relative competition and cost for PPC advertising.  This is important because if you want to get your website ranked, you need to know how hard the competition is fighting for those positions already.

3. EXTERNAL: Google Trends

Google keyword tools only show you snapshots in time. So once, you've found some keyword phrases that you think you want your business to rank for, you should use Google Trends to compare how those phrases have changed over time. Google Trends is highly aggregated and it gives you no number values.  But you can get relative comparisons. For example, I compared the phrase "web developer" to "social media" to see how each is changing.  You can see why we at Yardstick Services are getting more and more interested in social media for small business. It goes without saying that you'll want to pick keywords that are higher up on Google trends and are showing an increasing trend (or at least not a decreasing trend).

4. INTERNAL: Google Adwords

The real intelligence, believe it or not, is within Google Adwords. I really like setting up small (say $100) campaigns for my clients and creating a bunch of ads for keywords that relate to pieces of content in their website. There's a whole science to setting up Adwords that I won't get into here, but at the end of a month, you get some absolutely amazing numbers showing you exactly how many people searched for a particular keyword in your target market. It's worth the investment because now you'll be able to really refine the keywords in your website for you target market based on real solid numbers.

Check back in each of the above for a number of months and make small changes to the keywords in your site and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

As usual, if you have any questions, feel free to comment below or drop me a line @yardstickceo.

This installment of Social Media Marketing for Small Business is a list of 10 tasks and routines for a small business owner to use, in order to effectively apply a social media marketing strategy.

In part 1 we summarized 3 applications - Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - and your homework was to simply register with the services and become a good listener. By now, you should have gotten an idea of how these tools are being applied by larger organizations, and hopefully have participated as well.

If you are reasonably well-versed with technology and on-line interfaces, then setting up and designing your accounts should not be too difficult. Each application has a wealth of FAQs, help pages and user-forums that will provide you with guidance if you get stuck. For more professional quality work, such as applying your corporate logo, or designing a professional background image for your YouTube Channel, having a media-professional assist you is highly recommended.

Ten steps and recommendations to launching your small business social media strategy:

1.    INVITE EVERYONE, LEAVE NO STONE UNTURNED
After you’ve created your accounts, go through all your address books and mailing lists, both personal and professional and merge them into a targeted list for up-load. Use the “invite friends” wizards that are built into most social media platforms, to automatically search for and be-friend or follow people you already know. This will build your initial social communities and form the beginnings of a critical mass. The more people you can add, the better, so don’t be shy.

2.    PUBLISH NEWS AND RELEVANT INFORMATION
Share content on a routine base. For Facebook - we recommend every other day, twitter - 3 or more messages daily and for YouTube - a short video once a week. This is like going to the gym to lose weight. You want to keep the momentum going, keep yourself topical and encourage the growth of your community through value-added habits.

3.    CONTENT IS KING
So what should you be publishing? A basic strategy is to simply publish news stories, web resources and tools that may be of interest to your social community, as well as being relevant to your brand and corporate message. Third-party content - stories from the local paper for example - is a good start. Ideally though, you want to create ORIGINAL content, and then use your social networks to publish announcements and promote web-traffic towards that content. For example, if you created a YouTube video, you would then post that video to your Facebook page, and send out a series of tweets, inviting people to go watch the video.

4.    BE SOCIABLE
Engage other users and pages. Suppliers, trade organizations and other corporate allies of yours are all great starting places to stick your name and brand. By commenting on other pages and posts, you generate additional entry points and opportunities to expose yourself. This is the bumper-sticker of the Internet.

5.    ACKNOWLEDGE ACTIVITY
NEVER ignore, miss or blow-off an attempt at communication, a question or a thank-you. When members of your social community interact with your page, be sure to publicly acknowledge their participation. A quick reply-comment will bump that post to the top of the news feeds, and encourage future engagement.

6.    THE REAL WORLD STILL EXISTS
A common criticism of social media is that culturally we are living inside our computers, isolated from the “real world”. Social media is just the opposite. These interactive tools serve to PROMOTE, ENCOURAGE and SHARE our off-line lives. Events are planned and promoted via Facebook, then de-briefed and re-lived through photos, videos and editorials. As a business, if you are hosting or sponsoring an event, be sure to use these tools to bring further relevance, participation and exposure to your involvement for maximum return.

7.    ADD LINKS TO YOUR WEBSITE
Think of your social networks as dynamic mailing lists. By letting visitors to your website know that you have a social media community and making those communities as accessible as possible, you encourage further growth. Adding social media links to your website’s front page, will allow visitors to quickly and easily connect with your community, leading to future dialogue, interaction and communication.

8.    TWITTER
Despite what you may have been reading, Twitter is NOT only for people announcing their breakfast menu. It is an effective tool for announcing product launches, services you’ve added to your company’s offerings and to promote content within your network that you’d like people to read or watch. But first you need to build an audience. Use a tool like www.hootsuite.com, to track keywords relevant to your business, organize relevant accounts you are monitoring, and to see who’s following you back. Look for discussions relevant to your brand and engage others by following them, re-tweeting their messages and studying what is being said by others. The more you follow and participate, the more you are followed back. The more followers you have, the greater an impact you will have when those vital sales messages are transmitted.

9.    BE POSITIVE, CONVERSATIONAL, AND PERSONABLE, LEAVING THE DOORS WIDE OPEN
Control of message and control of distribution is a notion that marketing departments need to let go of. In social media marketing for small business, not everything that is being said or done as it relates to your brand can be harnessed and controlled, nor should you be trying to. Conversations and discussions about your business ARE going to happen, and yes we want to encourage those conversations. Setting up road-blocks and limitations will only hinder the very nature of how social media marketing helps your business increase its client-base. Allow content sharing on your Facebook Page. Be casual and personable with the language and content you choose to post. Encourage others to contribute content to your strategy.

10.    CALL TO ACTION - ASK QUESTIONS, THROW CONTESTS, INVITE ACTIVITY
A social media marketing strategy is only as strong as the activity and traffic flow its profiles generate. The more activity and interest generated, the more brand awareness and impressions your business will gain. So how do we accomplish this? Include a call to action in your post. This may be as simple as instructing readers to visit a specific page on your website, to more elaborate activities, such as throwing contests and using incentives to encourage public contribution of content. The more others participate in your page, the more third-party exposure you will gain.