Does Your Small Business Really Need a Website?

Can your small business forgo the resources required to build and maintain a website and, instead, capitalize your social media presence?

The objective, un-biased answer is no, and here are the reasons why.

Marketing reach, brand control, and SEO linking strategies are only three of the 11 main reasons for small businesses to have a website, as described in this article by Outspoken Media. In the article, they describe how social media is powerful, but it is not an effective substitute for a website.

Here is a flavorful quote from the article:

“Building a social media presence without a Web site is like getting people hot and bothered over your product and then being too lazy to open the door when they attempt to come in.  What was the point?”

Read the full article, and contact WBC to find out how our website services can help your business.

Social Media Services

There is no one size fits all approach to social media marketing for businesses. Each business can benefit from a customized approach based on their goals and the needs of their customers. For a business, social media can be a great benefit for: business promotion, customer engagement, and customer service. In the new world of social media marketing, the users market the company instead of the company marketing to the users. It’s critical to let the users speak their mind on your social media pages, but, unlike print marketing, the company has the unique opportunity to respond to the customer, address his or her needs, and have that conversation public for everyone to see that your company conducts itself with customer service as its focus.

Social media can also be a place in which managing your brand’s reputation is very important. It takes a dedicated resource and a lot of knowledge to know how to monitor how your company is being spoken about across a myriad of social media platforms and search engines. It also takes expertise to prepare a plan in case your company receives negative publicity from even one or more dissatisfied customers.

WBC offers the following social media services:

• Social media strategy

The strategy is the blueprint for the social media plan. It will include an overview of goals, identification of key performance indicators (KPI), discussion of metrics used to analyze the key performance indicators, analysis of audience and what platforms will yield the greatest reach, and assessment of overall impact social media can have on business objectives.

• Social media engagement guidelines

Every company should develop a list of guidelines for how employees should and should not conduct business on social media sites while representing the brand. Social media can be a slippery slope in which personal profiles intermingle with professional interactions. There are best practices that can be easily documented and posted on a company intranet to help employees use social media in the most safe and constructive manner possible. We can help your company develop these guidelines.

• Competitor overview

Even though one social media plan does not fit with every company, it is a good idea to know what your competition is doing. Knowing the trends and popular practices your competition is using will help you outpace your competitors and outsmart them in the long run.

• Training on online reputation management

Once your social media profiles are launched, they become an open forum for positive and negative customer interaction. We will train you on the best monitoring programs you can use to make sure that you are aware what the public is saying about your brand so that you can react quickly to any customer concerns that, without intervention, could easily escalate into a brand damaging campaign. Excellent customer service is key to turning a potentially negative comment into a positive customer experience that anyone who visits your social media site will see.

Contact WBC today to see how we can help your business use social media. Email us or fill out our online contact form.

Hootsuite Upgrades

In April 2010, Hootsuite added some upgrades that makes it easier to update multiple social media pages (including Twitter and Facebook pages) and to share administration privileges with others. According to the brand’s April 13, 2010 article, each account can add “team members” to the account without compromising password security and each member can hold various administration capabilities (i.e., basic or advanced).

The new updates allows the administrator to add multiple accounts to his or her account without having to create a new account (before accounts with different email addresses couldn’t share the same account). The upgrades also includes adding multiple RSS feeds to a social media pages and a ‘reply all’ option. According to the April article, this option allows the administrator to pre-populate a message with all recipients of an original message with one click.

Learn more about the April 2010 upgrades below:

YouTube video about the Team Collaboration upgrades
Blog post with screenshots and examples
HootSuite Help Desk
Series of Webinars form the HootSuite Teams

Problems with creating a Facebook page

There are some easy ways to market your company on Facebook, and creating a Facebook Page (not to be confused with a Facebook personal page) is one of them. There are a few glitches the company hasn’t fixed yet but knowing how to avoid them can prevent a lot of stress-filled workdays. Please note this blog will continue to be updated everytime Facebook creates a problems (er, I mean fixes a problem).

Problem 1, Types of Pages |

Updating an existing Facebook Page can wreak havoc if you don’t create the page correctly the first time.

For example, creating a Facebook Page includes choosing what type of page it will be. When creating a Facebook Page, you need to decide if it will be a page for a local automotive, café, museum/attraction company, if it will be a page for a brand/product/organization or if it will be a page for an artist/band/public figure (See Figure A). Your answer will affect the subject fields available in the ‘Info’ tab (See Figure B).

Figure A

Figure B

If you choose a particular type of page, publish the page and attract fans you can only change the type of a page if you create an entirely new page. You will have to attract these fans to the new page all over again. We are hoping Facebook will solve this problem soon.

Problem 2, Creating Vanity URLs |

A vanity URL is when you specify the wording after the ‘.com’ section. A Facebook Page can create its own vanity URL after 25 Fans. So instead of a long URL like this, http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Bartlett-IL/Nicodinos-Pizza-Co-Cafe/366221028666?ref=search&sid=20312720.3487400559..1, the Facebook URL can be a simpler URL like this, http://www.facebook.com/Nicodinos-Pizza-Cafe. But be warned – you cannot update this vanity URL after it’s submitted.

To create your vanity URL, login and go here http://www.facebook.com/username. Choose the page you want to create the vanity URL for and press Submit. Presto!

Leave a comment on any other Facebook improvements you know about.

Problem 3, Directing users to a default landing tab |

In May 2010, Facebook made it harder for small businesses with small budgets to direct people to a default tab. The Facebook memo specified users can get around this problem only by working with a Facebook sales rep and asking for the Facebook page to be allowed to create default tabs or only if the page has over 10,000 Fans. But there are a few tricky ways to get around this. One is to use your left rail and the FBML application to direct people to click on a specific tab. Socialmediatoday published an excellent blog with graphics demonstrating this technique.

Another tip is to know what the unique URL each tab has and diret people to that URL instead of your basic Facebook URL. For example, WBC’s FB URL is www.facebook.com/webbusinessconsultants but we would direct people to http://www.facebook.com/webbusinessconsultants?v=app_4949752878 which points people to the Suggest To A Friend tab.

Using Online Reputation Management for Negative Reviews

Outspoken Media posted an article about how a company should react to a negative review or, ugh, outright attack in search engines and social sites. In the article, Lisa Barrone outlines the situations in which responding to bad online press is necessary and the times in which you should sit back. She also outlines some steps to take when trying to mediate an online reputation disaster. Here are some of those steps:

• Listen
• Be Honest
• Remain Calm
• Speak Like a Person, not a PR campaign
• Promise to do better

Lisa also linked to a great flow chart created by the U.S. Air Force that any company could follow to determine the severity of the attack and  how the company should respond.

Related Article:

Online Reputation Management 101

Social Media is just a fad

Yep, you are right Social Media is a fad. It will disappear just like Pet Rocks, flagpole sitting, Garbage Pail Kids, and well you get the idea. Soon something else will take the place of Social Media, much like it is taking over search and other areas of the web.

How are people finding the information they need today? Are they finding it in places like Google, Yahoo, or another search engine? I would say that the search engines still have a pretty strong hold on this, for now. Though Social Media isn’t far behind. Let me give you an example. A few months back I was looking for an e-commerce/shopping cart option that was easy to use and also SEO friendly. I spent a few moments digging into Search Engine Land, just to come up empty, like a glass on a hot summers day. I turned to my Twitter followers and asked the question, and I continued to search on my favorite search engine. Within minutes I was getting all kinds of suggests to look up. Some of these weren’t even on the first few pages of results page. Read more

Online Reputation Management 101

Online Reputation Management involves controlling your brand’s reputation online by creating your company’s profile on social media sites, monitoring what people are saying about your brand, and finally addressing negative comments early.  When a customer goes to the internet to search your product or company, he or she will be looking for positive or negative postings in roughly the first two pages of the search engine results pages.  What will they see?  Putting ORM to practice means caring (and controlling) what the results say about your company or brand. Below is a step by step strategy for creating and maintaining a positive reputation online. For more information, check out this great article written by Outspoken Media called the Online Reputation Management Guide.

How to use social media to improve sales

Another local internet marketing company posted a blog entitled “Twitter and the Bottom Line for a Service Business” last July with the following question: “Can I use Twitter or any online social media to improve the bottom line of my “Local Service” business?” Chris Nastav at KC Web Specialists goes on to specify that this question is for small service-oriented businesses, and argues that successful social media pages are for product-oriented companies. My partners and I have also confronted this dilemma and here are a few of the main points we discussed:

• Small service-oriented businesses should create a generic topic social media page. This promotes the service industry, allows consumers to receive feedback from other users or the client and promotes the client
• Social media can be harder for a service-business because these businesses are often family owned and small – this leaves little time for Internet posts and blogs
• But small businesses have multiple advantages over larger companies
• Besides creating a generic social media page, the client must be taught how to analyze the social media data

Create a generic social media page

An example of this strategy can be seen on the Facebook Pizza fan page where, as of January 27th, there are over 4.7 million fans – but the Info tab is empty. Can you image how high the ROI for a small pizza shop would go if the shop created such a generic page and if the creator included a link back to the pizza shop’s Web site in the Info tab?

Now look at this page: most popular Facebook pages. If the Facebook Pizza page had 4.7 million fans (and had specified a URL such as Facebook.com/pizza, it would be ranked within the top 15 most popular Facebook pages! A small family-owned business could be competing against Michael Jacksin, Britney Spears and other multi-millionaires.

The trick is (here’s where WBC comes into play) is how to start social media page, what are the best marketing tactics and design for such a page and how can the creator post content to the page to continue the Fan popularity. As a test to this theory, we created a generic Facebook page called www.facebook.com/webmarketing. Similar to the Facebook Pizza page, the /webmarketing page will be used for marketing gurus to post links, advice and questions. As of January 29th, this page had one fan – that’s me.

Create an online marketing strategy

Small business owners need to specify where they want their company promoted and how all of these options are connected. The photos below promote a visual brand-marketing map. It shows how the brand connects to the consumer and how all components within the brand connection to each other – and back again.

It’s important to write down this type of a strategy. If you do, you can tell where a weak point within your strategy is and improve it.

Marketing advantages for small businesses

A December 2009 blog from Web site analyst blog giant, SEObook.com, lists multiple advantages for small businesses including agility (advantage to change tactics quickly) and being a niche market (no one wants to link to large consumer sites). With a written online marketing map, a generic social media page and the ability to move quickly can lead a small business into a wider customer audience and an increased ROI.

How to use social media for marketing purposes

You may have heard it’s a good idea to use social media to market your business but you’re not sure how to do this. Before you dive into the social media world, the first hurtle is to know if you can update content on a continuous basis. The second hurtle is if your products or services can attract the social media audience. This blog addresses the later.

Here are a few professional BtoC Facebook pages:

Seventh Generation, The Gap, Cheetohs, Starbucks, Pizza

What do the above Facebook pages have in common? If you said, popular topics, you are correct. The best social media pages are made from general topics people love to use or talk about. Sustainability, clothing and food are some of these topics. How do you create a popular Facebook pages for your small or medium sized business? Create a page on a general topic and promote your company in the Info tab. Create an individual tab with html and the FBML include and promote your company this way. Make this tab your Default tab so users see this first when viewing your Facebook page. If you have an HTML guru on your staff use that person otherwise it pays to hire a professional.

Here are a few successful Twitter pages:

Oprah, Ellen Degeneres, or go to 25 of the best designed Twitter pages

What do the above Twitter pages have in common? The Tweets are daily or multiple times a day, they utilize the background image to promote the product (Oprah herself, Ellen’s sound stage or a craft via design elements) and they customize the URL to promote the name of the person or company. Use your Twitter background to promote your craft, like this typography Twitter page or your company, like this freelanceer’s Twitter page.

Best Practices for hosting a social media site:

1. Always interact with your fans. Always post manual updates and respond to comments as soon as you can. The point of a social media page is being social, right?

2. Don’t create a page unless it’s professional. Research what makes the best social media page then jump into creating one.

3. Don’t create a social media page unless you can update it every few days.

What is the difference between social media sites?

According to CNN, Nielsen found Facebook users are 25 percent more likely to be affluent than MySpace users. Twenty-three percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 compared to only sixteen percent of MySpace users. The report unveiled MySpace users “tend to be ‘in middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods” in comparison to Facebook users. “Facebook [use] goes off the charts in the upscale suburbs,” said to Mike Mancini, vice president of data product management for Nielsen.

How does this research impact your business?

The impact of more demographic research by the three most popular social media sites lends itself to creating strategic marketing campaigns (The word ‘campaign’ may emanate an expensive bill but a marketing campaign can start at a few hundred dollars). Companies who want to reach an affluent audience may concentrate content on Facebook or LinkedIn, but companies that want to reach an audience with smaller salaries may want to concentrate on content with MySpace.

CNN reports the Nielsen research shows almost 38 percent of LinkedIn users earn more than $100,000 a year, but companies that wish to use only one social media site and reach a broader audience should use Twitter. “Nielsen’s survey didn’t find a dominant social class on Twitter as much as they found a geographic one: Those who use Twitter are more likely to live in an urban area where there’s greater access to wireless network coverage,” said Mancini. More information like this Nielsen report can help tame marketers frustrated social media antics and allow them to concentrate on sites that will result in higher leads.

How can you monetize and prioritize using social media?

Besides promoting the popularity of social media, this research promotes the need for a social media strategy. The demographic differences between the large social media sites can help marketers plan a social media strategy and focus attention on the sites that may lead to higher leads. Many marketing agencies can help create a simple social media strategy that is customized for your business. Ask the agency if they offer an a la carte options (Web Biz Consultants does).

Take Away Lessons

• Pay attention to new information about social media. This is one phenomenon that is not going away (Although social media sites like Facebook or MySpace may be replaced with another option). Social media is so popular that large research companies like Nielsen Claritas is spending time discovering specifics about this phenomenon
• Have a specific social media strategy to leverage leads and information effectively.