There has been a lot of news and buzz lately around social media. Blogging, Youtube,Facebookand Twitterhave exploded on the Internet and this craze has brought a lot of questions from my customers about whether or not they should be utilizing these sites for their business marketing. I give them the full benefit of my years of technical consulting and market analysis capability and respond with the always helpful "it depends" response. The tools are free so it will cost you nothing to use them but your time. But make sure you have the time to do it right. The most valuable asset we small business owners have is our time, so we need to make sure we optimize it with a good return on our investment.
I plan on posting a series of articles in the coming days in techniques I believe will help any business in promoting themselves through these social media tools. Remember that it truly does depend on your business if these techniques work for you. If you are Hardinge Inc. and are selling repair parts for your machine tools then people might not be interested in following you on Twitter. But a video library depicting different products in your line hosted on Youtube may work well to promote your business. Want to see the solution in action? Browse over to http://videos.hardinge.com/ and see how we are using Youtube to serve up high quality videos in a cost effective model. The site has an Admin panel so Hardinge personnel can add new videos as soon as they are made and they don't need me to update the site. We added the capability to link each video to a specific web page so the customer can jump right to www.shophardinge.com and purchase the product if it applies to that given video.
I am working on some good articles where I will discuss ideas on using BLOGS to promote your business expertise. Use Youtube to connect with your customers in a personal manner. Combine Facebook with Twitter to increase foot traffic to your place of business. So stay tuned as I post ideas on how you can incorporate social media into your business marketing plan.