Social Media That Matters

Small business social media is a moving target. Since you’re already inundated with too many tasks and not enough  time you’ve got to be very cutthroat with what makes your priority list and what gets filtered out as being of “too  little importance”.

In terms of social media your local business should definitely be on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

For hiring purposes having a presence on LinkedIn is highly recommended.

But when it comes to making more sales and profits unless you’re a small business selling in the  business-to-business space then you can put LinkedIn lower on your priority list.

Facebook

The big updates on Facebook are the possibility, nay likelihood, of the “timeline” being rolled out for Facebook  business pages. You’ve probably seen the timeline on your own personal profile and there’s much speculation it’ll be  available for small businesses and large businesses alike soon.

F. commerce is another big Facebook initiative they’re looking to popularize in 2012. This is only going sto be more  of a priority as the hype machine builds up to their initial public offering on the stock market.

Making more money per user is going to be a big focus within the company as well as on Wall Street. FB was only a  little over $4 per user as compared to Google’s over $30 per user.

Twitter

Twitter is much improved in terms of curators being a central hub where users can follow them for only the most  important and relevant content on that topic or in that market. Helping filter the massive information flow is very  important to twitter followers.

So becoming an expert influencer is directly correlated to your ability to filter out only the best stuff in your  market and post only that stuff through your twitter account. Obviously, you’ll want to mix in your own stuff but  don’t only post your own stuff.

Twitter ads

As Twitter continues to grow and hog more bandwidth the calls to make more money from the inside the company as well  as from their investors are reaching a fever pitch. So they’ve experimented with having “promoted tweets” flow into  users accounts.

As you’d expect twitter users want everything to be free all the time and there’s been a backlash against the  promoted tweets idea. To keep the service free they’re likely going to have to do this.

So testing and measuring some paid advertising on Twitter for your small business is recommended.

Google+

Google+ is the new kid on the block but is definitely gaining traction.

At this point, at the very least, you should set up your business profile on the Google plus platform. Google is  known to show favoritism to its own products and services as you’d expect.

I’ve whittled it down to only 3 so you can accomplish these or hand them off to a trusted employee to accomplish  them.