Small Businesses and SMM

Many small businesses do not have the resources to implement social media marketing. I found the article as a useful resource for Social Media Marketing (SMM) in general, yet I am not about to go out and recommend any of my clients to go out and try these jump practices. Just like having a web presence, the efforts have to be maintained, which frankly most companies large and small can not keep up.

SMM is a powerful tool for niche markets. Blogs such as Digg.com could potentially create a massive swam of traffic to the site. “Sixty to one hundred hits per second,” JamesBake.com finally hit 200 hits in 30 days Sunday night. If my site were to attract 200 hits a second I would block off a few hours every day to devote to my website, and add a few, “Help James Pay Off College Loans,” buttons around the site to help pay for my college debt. Ugh, those are necessary evils, just like having to shower after working out. (Just kidding.) Being one person I understand the difficulties small businesses face; sometimes there are just too many things to do and not enough time to do them.

My suggestion, as I flip flop around, would be for a company with a decent website and an adequate amount of visitors to have employees blog. Let me explain more. It might be interesting to set up a plan for employees where they are encouraged to spend a half hour each day blogging and interacting on social networks using their work contact information. That could be a wonderful technique to show expertise, to encourage technology adaptation, to alleviate the lack of an official position, all while promoting the company. Also, this will help the company seek out research for their industry, competitor practices, new technology, misconceptions, etc.

Lets play with that idea more. Pretend ABC has 15 employees in the office. Have each employee spent an hour blogging every day. That is 15 hours a week. Now set up a 1 hour meeting once a month to share practices. Start off by making someone in change of adding analytic tracking tools to the website and setting up methods of tracking the soon to happen activity, as well as keeping copies of all blogs. This content can be used for the website and/or other marketing pieces.

Benefits to Employees

• Improved communication skills
• Adaptation of technology
• Increase learning and research
• Investment of employee to company

Benefits to Company

• Increase online presence
• Increase research and discovery of new information
• Low cost form of advertisement
• Content can be used for multi-uses such as newsletter material, website content and even training material
• Increase company knowledge base - not only will the employee gain knowledge but the company will as well. Having employees do research on topics and then write summaries (blogs) allows for easy learning for other employees.

There are some pros and cons to participating in SMM as a small business. If you have the resources, I’d say go for it. Otherwise focus on maintaining the content on the website.