17 per cent of small businesses are using Twitter to market

Social networking sites are rapidly expanding – the internet has 1.8 billion users, and more than 1 billion of these are on some form of social networking site, with around half logging on at least once a day. These sites have become the perfect tool for businesses, with access to millions of contacts and potential customers reached worldwide with daily updates, tweets, blogs, links and videos. The sheer number of networking sites can be confusing enough – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and FriendFeed to name but a few – before you even begin to think about how best to market your business
There’s no denying the positive benefits of marketing through social networking, no matter how small or large your company, and best of all, it’s free. In March this year, Dell announced $9m of its 2009 sales had come directly from Twitter and Facebook combined. Stephen Felice, president of Dell’s small and medium business group, said, ‘We interact with 3.5 million people through Twitter, Facebook, blogs and Flickr. These are powerful tools, but we don’t just use them for generating sales. Social media gives you information that you can use in real time, and base decisions on. Most people think that innovative technologies are used by enterprises, but they’re not, they’re first deployed by SMEs. This is a really powerful tool for SMEs, who don’t have the marketing dollars for traditional advertising.’

Press enter
To get started, you need to set up a page or profile for your company and post updates at least once a day to keep people coming back. Facebook is a good place to start. As the biggest social networking site in the world in just six years, it has gained 500 million global users and 26 million UK users, with an average user spending 55 minutes a day on the site. To start marketing on Facebook, rather than a profile page, businesses should create a fan page for their business. Other users can then ‘like’ your page, become a fan and post on the page’s ‘wall’. There are currently more than 1.6 million active fan pages, with businesses from Microsoft to Deutsche Bank to Starbucks with their own pages. Starbucks is particularly successful with over 12 million fans currently discussing their favourite Starbucks’ drinks and stores. Try searching other businesses similar to your own to find out if they have a Facebook page, and how they use it. Paul Chaney, author of two books on social networking, The Digital Handshake and Realty Blogging, says, ‘Due to its enormity of size and scale, Facebook is a must-do, regardless of whether yours is a B2B or B2C company, it’s a world bazaar and it only makes sense to have a presence there.’ According to research conducted by Vodafone last year, Facebook is the most popular social networking site for women, so it’s particularly useful if your company or target consumer is female-orientated. Micro-blogging site Twitter was found to hold equal appeal for both men and women, while men are more likely to use MySpace. However, MySpace is probably one to avoid as it is mostly used by teenagers and more importantly is plummeting in popularity; it’s not recommended unless your target consumers are under the age of 18.

Tweet your heart out
Since Twitter exploded onto the social networking scene in 2006, it has attracted 75 million users, and 17 per cent of small businesses in the UK are using the service. Plenty of high-powered names in business are tweeting, including Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Barack Obama. Essentially a micro-blog, tweets are a maximum of 140 characters and allow you to communicate casually with potential customers and contacts, in a way that you wouldn’t be able to in normal day-to-day business. It’s also very simple to use; Kyle Lacy, author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies, says, ‘Twitter has become successful because it’s easy to use and understand. It is snippets of your mind, day, and brain being shared 100 million times a day.’ You can also monitor what others are saying about your company or brand, and exchange public messages with users, which will appear on their homepage. Author Chaney adds, ‘I always pair Twitter with Facebook as another “must-do”. The two work very well together in terms of reaching different audiences. And content can be automatically syndicated between the two, so that you post once, and your content is published twice.’ Twitter is currently developing a new business centre, a feature which will allow businesses to receive direct messages from any of their followers, regardless of whether they follow that person or not. This is a huge step forward for businesses that perform customer service via Twitter. However, although it’s undoubtedly an effective marketing tool and its business centre seems promising, Twitter’s popularity is waning. According to a study by RJMetrics, the rate of new users is slowing, and around 10-15 million accounts are inactive. Tweeting is slowing too – just 17% of all Twitter accounts tweeted in December 2009, down from 70% in early 2007. If you want to find out more about using Twitter for your business, read their Social Media Marketing guide for Business at http://business.twitter.com/twitter101, which covers everything from how to get started to how companies like Levi’s and Pepsi have used the site to their advantage.

Create the right buzz
As the Twitter population declines, a new rival social networking site has been created by Google called Google Buzz. Launched in February this year, it’s quickly gaining popularity – within a few days of its launch it had had more than nine million posts and comments, with around 160,000 posts an hour. Built into Google’s email service Gmail, it cleverly creates access to Gmail’s existing 150 million users. Unlike any other social networking site, you don’t have to build a friend list from scratch as you’re automatically following any Gmail contacts you’ve previously emailed. A combination of Facebook and Twitter, users can share photos, videos and links publicly or privately via a live feed, but unlike its rivals, when used on a mobile phone, the service shows your location in updates, and recommends which updates are most interesting for you. As well as the usual social media marketing benefits for your business, by using real-time search, Google Buzz can be used to improve traffic to your company’s website– by posting often you’ll rank higher in Google search results.
If you want to use a more business-focused social networking site, LinkedIn is one of the best. With over 75 million users, LinkedIn is aimed at professionals and links colleagues and contacts. It’s particularly useful if you’re recruiting or looking for a job, as there’s a dedicated jobs section and users upload their employment history onto their profile. If you’re looking for someone with a particular skill or want to ask your peers a question, LinkedIn has an answers section, where anyone on the site can ask a question, and other users will respond. Service requests are also posted in answers, which are an ideal way to get new business and clients.
If you’re struggling to decide which social networking site suits your business most and will get maximum exposure for your company, it’s best to join as many of the top sites as possible. Shama Kabani, president of web marketing firm The Marketing Zen Group and author of The Zen of Social Media Marketing, says, ‘My top three favourite social networking sites for business are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. LinkedIn is great for finding the go-to person within a company, Facebook is a fabulous way to build brand awareness, and Twitter is a great human search engine.’

Ideas that stick
Unlike other social networks, YouTube is used purely for video blogging. The site is the most popular user-generated website in the UK, and in May this year received a record 144.1 million viewers, watching a total of 14.6 billion videos. Though posting a video on YouTube is a longer process than writing a tweet or updating on Facebook, the results can be far more beneficial, with thousands or even millions of potential customers viewing your videos. YouTube viewers want to be entertained or shown how to do something – you can’t just post an advert for your business and expect thousands of hits.
The most powerful YouTube campaigns are simple but effective. One of the most successful YouTube marketing campaigns to date is by Blendtec, a US company that sells consumer and industrial strength blenders. Their YouTube videos titled “Will it blend?” feature an attempt (that nearly always works) to blend anything from an iPad to a hockey puck. Some of the videos have attracted more than six million viewers and their online sales have grown by 500%. The founder of Blendtec, Tom Dickson, has appeared on shows such as NBCs The Tonight Show, where he blended a rake handle, and the phrase “Will it blend?” has become famous with the company even selling T-shirts with the slogan.
Once you’ve posted your video, using the right keywords to list it is essential so that viewers can find it. YouTube is owned by Google, so videos will also appear in Google’s search engine – another way to increase your website hits. You can also create your own channel to which viewers can subscribe, and you can then send marketing emails out to your subscribers.
With more and more social networking sites being developed, it’s certain that connecting to people through the web is set to continue for the foreseeable future. Kyle Lacy, author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies, says, ‘Social networking has been around for centuries. However, we are just experiencing a new form of communication because of technology. Technology will change but the basics of communication will always be intact.’