Social Media & Small Business: Top 5 Things You Should Already Be Doing in 2012

Social media is “the new kid on the block” when it comes to marketing your business. Although social media has been around in some form for over 10 years, it is only during the past few years that businesses began to adapt to this new form of interacting with their customers on a personal, every day basis. This trend is here to stay, and I am here to make social media work for your business.


To a long-time small business owner, new Internet ventures can be scary. If you haven’t jumped on the Internet and social media marketing bandwagons yet, 2012 is the time to do it. Here are the top 5 things you can do to improve your marketing online.
Google has created a series of applications (apps) to not only help you with your day to day affairs with in your business, but also to understand your marketing and track your business online. You can use Google’s email (gmail.com) for business use, as well as set up shared documents, spreadsheets, and calendars. Google does go beyond that, having relationships with HTML email companies (enabling you to send out a newsletter to an email list, for example); Google Analytics, allowing you to track not only how people are finding your website, but what portions of your website they are interested in; and Google Adwords, which gives priority ad placement on Google and their partners(when someone completes a search using one of your keywords.)

These apps are also just the tip of the iceberg, as they develop and release new applications frequently and their site has many more. You need to look at them and figure out what works for you. If anything, after you set up your website, set up Google Analytics. This will give you valuable information on your site and pages within it that will allow you to alter your information and grow your site, if need be.


Another Google app that I use is Google Alerts. I have them set up at work for my company’s name and nicknames. I get an email every day of new articles, websites, blogs, and mentions of my company. The good information comes with the bad information — being in marketing, I need to see it all. This is the same attitude you should have. Social media and online marketing have given businesses the opportunity to stand up for themselves and address adversity head on and usually, almost immediately. Good news and articles can then be shared with your “followers” on your website and Facebook fan page immediately. In turn, bad news or information can be responded to quickly. Fans and customers will want to see how you react to such information. They will hope that you can do so with dignity and respect.

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Google Plus May Become An Online Marketer’s Heaven

Google Plus Growing Based On Real Identity

Google Plus recently required that user profiles be based on real names, which frustrated some online marketers. Though the new social media platform has only been open to field testing for a month, it has shown that it can generate healthy traffic to business websites. The new social media platform has over 20 million users, many of them entrepreneurs. Twitter and Facebook both took more than three years to hit the same number of users. Google Plus is starting to be a significant source of referral traffic to marketing user websites, and at the core of Google Plus’s mission is Google’s desire to connect real identity to real people – and their businesses, if they choose to bring them onboard to the new social media player.
All Google Plus Profiles Required To Be Public

In terms of using Google Plus as a marketer or business owner, there is new information that entrepreneurs should heed. According to Theregister.co.uk, Google Plus users who do not have public profiles by July 31st, 2011 will find their profiles deleted. They can choose to delete the profiles themselves. Additionally, all public profiles are required to be associated with a real name. For businesses, Google Plus is releasing its business offering before the end of 2011. A spokesperson who works for Google told Venturebeat.com that the business product is one in which, “…You can expect to see a level of analytics and measurement that you’d typically find in Google products as well as a nuanced approach to how things are shared.

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Can Google+ Bring Online Marketing Strands Together?

Until now, there have been two very distinct strands to online marketing, informed by the two giants of their fields – Google and Facebook.

The search engine giant has always been the undisputed ruler of the SEO marketing world, with Yahoo and Bing coming a clear second, while Facebook – along with Twitter – have been instrumental in pushing social media to the forefront of all successful online marketing strategies.

Now everything is likely to change again as the two strands come together, thanks to the launch of Google’s very own social network, Google+.

Google+ has already been the victim of its own success, going over capacity within two days of its launch and necessitating a temporary halt until it could recalibrate its systems.

Experts are saying that Google+ could herald a new dawn for online marketing, bridging the gap between such business-orientated networks, such as LinkedIn, and the more casual friends networks like Facebook.

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