Social Media Marketing Trends and Ideas

According to the study called “The State of Small Business Report” from the Network Solutions Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s School of Business, the use of social media websites has doubled from 12% to 24% in 2009. Part of the reason for this trend is because small businesses are looking for marketing tactics that are effective and less-expensive.

The chart shows that the favored method is to create a company page on LinkedIn and Facebook. That is a good start but the second most popular tactic is to post articles of interest onto LinkedIn and Facebook. For a lot of small businesses that have websites, this could be difficult if the website does not have a Content Management System (CMS). CMS enables control of the content of your website. And if you have a blogging capability than the task of posting your content to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter becomes much easier.

A good website design can even automate the process. For example, as I am creating this content right now, I also have a check box that enables the posting to automatically “Tweet”  my posting on Twitter and another checkbox that sends the posting out to Subscribers of my blog. I also have a Facebook Share badge that I will click on to Share this on my Facebook page.

When I setup the automated tweet, I add a description that includes a request to retweet it. That, hopefully, will help spread my ideas and content and bring me a few new followers. Let us know if you need any help. Thank you for reading this and feel free to leave a comment below.