Social Media sites such as Facebook, UK Small Business Network, Twitter etc. can greatly improve your visibility on the internet and help drive traffic through to your websites and landing pages. This article shows you why you need to embrace the social media revolution………
As with most things within both marketing and computing, activities tend to take on acronyms. Internet marketing used within a small business model is no different. If you talk to Internet Marketing Professionals you will be bombarded with their beloved 3 and 4 letter acronyms such as html, SEO, SEM, PPC etc. One which you may not have heard of, but is slipping into conversations more and more these days is SMO.

SMO simply stands for Social Media Optimisation. The mere fact that SMO is increasingly spoken about within Internet Marketing circles, reflects its growing importance to businesses in their constant battle to stay ahead of their competitors.

As you will probably know, our business model has always been to take the same techniques as Internet Marketers and the big corporate boys use and apply them to our clients within the small Business community. SMO is no different, however, the big companies spend an inordinate amount of money on increasing brand awareness by optimising their social media output. With small businesses SMO can be a cheap and easy way to get noticed by people who would not find your company on search terms alone.

SMO can in effect, expose you and your company to a wide audience with the added benefit of experiencing the knowledge you have of your industry without having gone to your website, which up to now was many small businesses way of getting their message in front of potential clients.

Many of you will have personal accounts with such things as Facebook and Twitter. These are the most basic social media tools but there are many others and with a bit of planning can significantly increase customer dialogue and consequently increase sales.

I now know of many individuals and small businesses that say their main contact with new and potential customers comes from direct contact through these social media sites.

In essence, Social Media is all about becoming part of a broad or focused community and being able to express thoughts, concepts and opinions which build following. With Social Media you can show people that you are an expert in your field and the fact is that people want to learn from experts.

So what is out there and how can you as an individual or small business use these social media sites? First let’s look at the different types of sites there are and the major players.