Social media sites can’t be ignored! Connecting online through social media has quickly become one of the most effective and affordable ways for regionally-based small businesses to connect to their target audience - at first virtually, and then hopefully off-line. It wasn’t that long ago when most of the Internet advertising / promotional opportunities weren’t available to small businesses. You could comment on forums one-by-one, or you could pay to blast the world, but few options existed in-between.
In yesterday’s Duct Tape Marketing’s Coaching Excellence Call, David Meerman Scott likened social media to the bars and coffee shops in your area. If you’re not hanging out with the in-crowd in your town, then you don’t have your finger on the pulse of what’s going on. Social media sites are just the latest place to hang out with your friends, colleagues — and hopefully your ideal clients.
The problem is that there are so many social media sites that it is often difficult to know where to start - or where to end! It’s not like you’re a teenager that can spend the whole day hanging out on MySpace. You have a job to do! You need to make your social media updates as effortless as you can.
The key is to have the social media sites connect to each other. The ideal is to update on your blog, and have a feed that will automatically update the rest of your networking sites. Tornado Marketing uses a variety of these sites to keep connected, including Twitter, Twitterfeed, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Facebook, Plaxo Pulse, Digg, YouTube, RSS, and of course, blogging. Now when we update our blog, our social media sites are updated too - easily and effortlessly.
There are plenty of social media sites we haven’t really investigated yet, but that goes back to our goals. We’re not blogging and using social media sites to create world domination. We just want to be able to communicate with our extended circle of friends, clients and colleagues.
We are working on a map that shows how we connect our blog to the social media sites we’re involved in. We plan to have it completed for the blogging event we’re doing with OCEntrepreneurs.com here in Orange County next month.
Do you have any hot tips to share? Any online tools that have made it easier to keep all of your social media sites connected and current? Any social media sites that you see gaining significant traction? We’d love to hear from you!
Hi there. No you can’t visit all of the blogs and forums out there, but everyone should set up alerts in Google or Yahoo. (That’s how I found out about this post). Add alerts for your company name, product name, executive name, competitors, or whatever else makes sense. Then you know if people are talking and you can jump in (like I’m doing here).
Take care, David
David Meerman Scott
July 18th, 2008