Social Media Tips: Online Strategies for Small Business Networking Profits

 

Small businesses today are using social media to compete with large company’s multi-million dollar marketing budgets.  Banding together with other small businesses, they are sponsoring events through sites like Twitter, Facebook and various blogs.

Having problems finding someone to handle all of the social media duties? Queensland, Australia held a contest to find someone to blog and promote tourism in their area. More than 34,000 applied for their dream job. Small companies all over are creating similar campaigns with hundreds of qualified entries and campaigns that are generating massive media attention with hundreds of thousands of articles written or blogged about them.

Since small, locally owned businesses don’t have the ten’s of thousands of dollars needed to build a website and crank up a media frenzy, they are turning to Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the Ning network to prove that small companies can compete with these big marketing budgets using just the free tools that are available online.

Small businesses use social media and social networking to augment their strategy for achieving marketing objectives. But, they also must have a clear understanding of their purpose and possibilities in two realms – social media, and social networking.

Social Media is a means to many ends – greater visibility (SEO), demonstrable thought leadership, establishing market preeminence, and perhaps social networking. It is important in today’s business climate to become an expert in social media plumbing; the delicate science of streamlining social media participation in ways that are operationally efficient.

Social Networking is what happens after social media has performed well; it is the humanistic side of the conversational web. Ergo, you can sign up on Linkedin and you can make 10,000 connections, but nothing will happen unless you produce social media. There are many types of social media . For example, a simple “Hello, tell me about your business.” written on a Facebook wall is a social media artifact. A blog post about the “The New Real-time Web” is also a social media artifact. Both examples might lead to a conversation which is an instance of social networking.

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By the way, do you want to learn more of my “tricks of the trade” of using social media to boost your online profits and exposure?

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