Why you should care. You’ve no doubt been hearing a lot about social media recently. Is it all hyperbole, a fad? Should you pay attention or even care? The answers are no – it’s not a fad, and yes, you’d better care.

Not only should you care, you should be doing something about it right now. Why? Because your customers care and they are using social media and your competitors care and they’re starting to leverage the benefits of social media too. 

With over 250 millions users today, if Facebook were a country it would be the fourth most populous country in the world, and according to Nielsen Research two-thirds of the Internet population visit social networks. Clearly there’s something compelling happening here.

When done properly, social media marketing can be an effective way to help your business reach potential customers and stay connected to current ones. But there are a few things you’ll need to know to help you get the most out of social media and avoid the pitfalls.

What is Social Media?
Knowing the answer to this question is a good place to start. The technical definition found on Wikipedia is: “Internet and mobile tools for sharing and discussing information” or “the changing trends in the use of web technology and design”.

To me, what social media is really about is conversations. Conversations made richer and more convenient. Social media offers a set of tools allowing users to easily create and share information and stories including links, audio and video, and gives marketers the ability to communicate and share their stories in an effort to generate new business.

Know Your Story
Rocky Mountain Soap in Victoria BC recently began using social media (blog, Twitter and Facebook) to market their store and build a following online.

• Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to send and receive “tweets” which are text based messages of up to 140 characters in length. Tweets will often include links to web pages with more information. 

Marketing Manager Scott McDonald, who goes by the Twitter handle “@FootButterGuy”, credits social media with a significant increase in store sales over the last few months. In fact, after a recent product swap campaign that they promoted heavily on Twitter and Facebook, sales were up dramatically and their social media profiles overflowed with positive customer comments.
 
Have a read through their blog and Twitter feed and I think you’ll understand why Scott’s social media approach has been successful. He’s friendly and self-effacing, yet engaging and full of relevant, useful content that customers naturally want to share with their friends. Even his Twitter bio espouses humility. “Just a guy making bubbles at Rocky Mountain Soap (Victoria), learning about how natural is important and sharing that.”

They highlight the importance of natural body care products and educate their customers by sharing information and creating a community around health conscious folks. They know their story and they’re telling it via social media. Rocky Mountain Soap – Victoria is doing social media right.

Hyper-local Marketing
Once you know your story the two key components to social media success for small businesses are immediacy and targeting. Twitter and Facebook enable you to target people in your geographic location with timely messages like special offers, sales and new product announcements. To do so you’ll need to find and engage the demographic most interested in your product or service.

You can start by using tools like Twitter Search and Twellow to find your “tribe”, people who live in your area and are interested in your company and products or services. Once you find them get to know them by first “following” them and then connecting by answering questions, sharing content that may be of value, or helping them by sharing or retweeting their posts.

• To "retweet" is to repeat/quote someone’s tweet. Usually when you come across an interesting tweet and you want to forward it so that people who follow you see it too – you retweet it.

This is something Scott from Rocky Mountain Soap has done very well. He has been building the company’s social capital by doing the right things on social media but also by participating in many offline social media events like local Tweetups (real world meeting between two or more people who know each other via Twitter) and getting involved in social media related charity events like Twestival.

Social Media Planning
As with any communications, it’s critical for small businesses to plan their social media marketing before they get started. In order to know if your social media efforts are succeeding or not, you’ll want to establish goals and have the right metrics and tools in place to measure them.

Do you simply want to raise awareness of your company, drive store traffic and increase sales, or increase loyalty among a core group of customers? Once you know what you want to achieve with social media you’re well on your way to integrating it into your overall communications plan and measuring success.

The time to tap into social media is now, before your customers ask why you’re not on Twitter, or worse yet, don’t ask and simply move on to your competition.