So we know that we have many social networks that you can sign up your small business for. This phenomenon of Social Marketing is here to stay, and if used right you have a huge opportunity to really grow your business. Let’s look at the two networks that everyone needs to use right now. The current heavy weight king of social networks is Facebook. This is the biggest, that baddest, and most established website in the social scene. You can pretty much do everything that you need to do on Facebook to grow your business, without any cost to you. 

The key with Social Marketing is engagement, and it’s no different with Facebook. If you want your fans to keep coming back to your fan page, you need to have an open line of communication with them.  

 You can easily do this by:

• Asking Questions
• Answer Questions
• Posting Photos, Videos
• Individually Thanking Your Fans
• Offering Facebook Only Specials

You also don’t want to overwhelm your fans. If your Facebook fans don’t think that your status updates are useful, they can just as easily un-fan your page. So be sure to keep this in mind before blindly posting every few minutes. Ask yourself this question before updating your status, “Does this information benefit my customers?” If it doesn’t, don’t post it.

The next big player in the social network landscape that all small business owners should use, is Twitter. I really like Twitter for the small business. Mainly because they train you to be brief and concise. Since you only have 140 characters to use, you better use them wisely. This allows you to think like a Newspaper Editor. Think about this for a moment. If you read news paper and magazine headlines, you pretty much have an idea of what the article is about. But if you need more information, or you find the headline interesting you’ll read the entire article.

You should use your Twitter status exactly like this. Give a short, very to the point headline, with a link back to a page on your site with all the information that they need to know. Twitter is very powerful to the small business owner. You can search for people that have questions and problems in your field, and help them just by answering a question. How amazing is that? 

The benefits of social marketing are many, however you shouldn’t see this activity as a task. You should see this as a genuine way to interactive with your audience. As we all know, people like doing business with people that they like.