Q&A Monday: Establishing a small business in social media

May 24, 2010 by Stephanie

Q: I own a small online business and I want to get our company active in social media. How do I get started?

MM, Yonkers, NY

A: For a small business with an online presence but no physical stores, here is a brief roadmap on how to get started.

What do you want to accomplish with social media? If you can’t readily answer this question, you may want to do some basic social media listening first to understand if there people who are discussing your brand have customer service questions, want to engage with you about products and services, or want to hear about specials and deals. Knowing this will help you gauge how active you may wish to be in social media and which topics or issues will be most interesting to your customers and potential customers.
Let’s assume you will not be fielding questions hourly about customer service issues, and that you’ll be focused on engaging with your customers about product- or service-related topics and themes. (You may answer the occasional customer service question, but we’re assuming you’re not walking into a hotbed of negative customer sentiment.) So you’ll need to develop content that explains, relates to and extends your brand and that is engaging enough for people to want to consume it and (hopefully) pass it along.
An important social media best practice is to create an editorial calendar, often an overall calendar for all your social efforts but sometimes specific to each platform.
img credit: Jason Permenter

This is something that ideally should be done before you start your social presence(s) and then updated regularly – either weekly, monthly or quarterly. Planning out your editorial content in advance takes away the “I don’t have time to write today” problem that most people have in maintaining social presences, and makes publishing content as easy as queuing it up and pushing a button.
Determine which social platforms make the most sense for your business. Facebook, with its nearly 500 million users, is an excellent way to engage with your brand fans and makes sharing your content pretty easy. But in order to build a strong presence on Facebook you may need to devote budget to building out your Facebook page in a compelling way, advertising to attract users, or creating contests or promotions that encourage pass-along by users. Twitter, by contrast, is (still) nearly cost-free, except, of course, for the time it takes for you to update and monitor, but Twitter reaches only a fraction of the total users that Facebook does. And a company blog may be the most engaging platform of all, as you have an opportunity to develop a strong brand personality through text and video – but it takes a lot of time to write posts or shoot videos. I recommend starting with one platform and doing that well until you feel confident that it’s natural enough to you that you can manage and continue to grow that presence without having to think and worry about it every day.
Once you’ve determined which platform you’re going to start with and gotten yourself established, continue to listen, then interact and react. Be sure to devote time each day to monitor your presences – ideally, check in a couple of times each day on Twitter or Facebook. There are services for Twitter, like TweetBeep, that will help alert you to comments directed at you or about you, which are huge time savers.

Stay tuned for more ideas on developing, budgeting for and maintaining social presences for small businesses. And please let me know your thoughts on how small businesses can establish themselves in social media by posting your comments below.