Guest Post: Social Media for Small Businesses – Hone Your Self-Promotion Tactics

Business management consultant, author, and educator Peter Drucker said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it”.

As a small business owner or self-employed writer, you know the importance of creating your own future, and of using social networking platforms to do it. To an independent employer, social media is a necessity in the modern business world.

Luckily, the most prominent social networking entities understand their role in advertising and developed new applications and tools for those in the business of growing a business.

Facebook

• If you’re looking for visibility, Facebook has recently added some options to further optimise your exposure. One great feature is the “See First” option, which allows users to add you to their list of people and groups that they want to see updates from before any others. Whether you announce a new blog post or a store sale, if you are on a user’s list, your announcement pops up before anything else in their thread.
• A second feature that boosts visibility for the marketer is the new conversion pixel code Facebook has implemented, which is designed to attract custom audiences. The code enables advertisers to keep track of multiple pixels existing on one web page. There were several issues with the old code that caused frequent crashes, resulting in the deletion of valuable data. The new code has eradicated this issue and additionally, allows for easy, in-page action tracking, or “clicks”.
• For the small business owner, Facebook has added a free option called the “Facebook Beacon”. With this feature, if individuals visit your business and connect to their Facebook accounts from there, they will be greeted by the Place Tips feature which offers information about your business. You can add a welcome note with photos as well as a prompt to like your page.

Twitter

• Twitter has flexed its advertorial muscles in recent years and is host to tons of potential leads. One option Twitter offers its business clientele is a landing page. Twitter’s notorious 140 character limit can be frustrating to small businesses and bloggers that simply cannot whittle down a bio to fit within such a constraint. Many subscribers use their Twitter profile web link to redirect browsers to their company’s homepage, but Twitter offers you the option to create a unique landing page and then to designate that page as your profile web address on Twitter.
• Be sure that you are utilising the photo option on Twitter. Pictures instantaneously make your tweets more appealing, and research shows that photos and infographics greatly increase the amount of attention you draw your way.
• In order to optimise your visibility, look at other successful Twitter pages and examine what makes that page so successful. For example, LifeLock’s Twitter page is a well-managed and well-established page, and one that consistently publishes quality content and engages with its customers.

YouTube

• YouTube is good for so much more than just posting videos of cats. The platform now enables you to alert your social network users when you complete certain actions. For instance, if you upload a video, you can automatically create a status update to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, or if you subscribe to a new channel, you can simultaneously inform selected users.
• Additionally, YouTube is an amazing tool to bump up your standing in a social search. A social search engine considers the ins and outs of content sharing in order to judge its relevancy to a user’s search. Google has even added the subcategory “Videos” to the display options for any search, but if your YouTube video is shared frequently or gains a large number of views, that video is bumped up in the search engine ranking, allowing your video to appear in organic searches, without the user even choosing the “Videos” option. As a result, your brand is exposed a larger potential audience outside parameters of social media.

Contemporary business marketing requires diligence and vigilance. You must always be looking for the next great tool for promoting yourself and your brand. You may not have a crystal ball to show you the future, but in taking advantage of the social media tools at you fingertips, you may not need one.