Social Media and the Minipreneur

Social Media is an absolutely essential component of a marketing plan for Minipreneurs. When used properly, all these various Social Media tools can provide the small business owner with a tactical advantage over larger competitors…but if used improperly, they can also close down a business.

So Exactly What Is Social Media?

According to Wikipedia. Social Media is participatory online media where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are made public via social media websites through submission. Often accompanied with a voting process to make media items become “popular.”

Social media refers to activities, practices, and behaviors among groups or (as Seth Godin says) “Tribes” of people who participate online to share information, knowledge, and opinions using some or all of these tools. Social media uses the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video.

OK, so where will you find these Social Media tools?

Following is a short description for more than 50 Social Media sites or New Media tools, roughly classified into nine key categories. These sites and software are also sometimes referred to as Web 2.0 tools.

Social Networking sites are those that allow you to build your network through various forms of “Friending”. These sites include Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Fast Pitch!, Ning, Orkut, Plaxo, Bebo, Friendster, Gather.com, etc.

Publishing Blogs or utilizing other CMS software to create allows you to customize the information, format and appearance for your specific business or topic. These tools include WordPress, TypePad, Blogger.com, Drupal, Joomla, and SlideShare. You can also “publish” using Wikipedia but are limited to their formatting and only on specific topics. With the various Wiki’s you are only a commentor and not a site owner or designer.

Photo Sharing sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Radar.net, SmugMug, Twitxr and Zooomr allow you to post photos, add comments and allow other users to share them, comment on them, rate them or even download them for their own use.

Video sites currently attract the highest amount of traffic on the internet. Sites like YouTube, Google Video, Brightcove, Metacafe, etc allow you to post videos, make comments, share them, link to them and use them for marketing. We highly recommend you utilize video in your marketng efforts.

Microblogging is another tool that is currently attracting tremendous volumes of traffic. The most widely used is Twitter, followed by Plurk and Twitxr.

Bookmarking tools/sites include Stumbled Upon, Digg, Reddit and are used to share your favorite sites with thousands of other users. Sites that get a high number of “shares” get higher ranking in the search engines due to the links that these sites generate.

Livecasting and Podcasting provides you with your own “Broadcast station” to market youe product – BlogTalkRadio, Live 365, Justin.tv, SHOUTcast, TalkShoe are some of the current favorites.

RSS feeds enable websites to alert Search engines and other blogs when updates are made to your website. Tools that enable RSS feeds are Atom, FeedBurner, PingShot and RSS 2.0

Search engines are the 10,000 pound elephant in the Social Media Marketing jungle. Google Search, Bing, IceRocket, MetaTube, EveryZing, Redlasso, Technorati and Yahoo! Search all have “bots” that troll through millions of websites every day looking for related content. Each Search Engine then uses different algorithms to determine the best way to classify and rank each page. Optimizing your website or blog to be most attractive to the search engines is called SEO (search Engine Optimization).

Obviously, not all of these tools will apply to your business and there is no need to fully understand each of them. We will help you become familiar with and utilize the top 10 in the context of a Minipreneur business.

Your goal must be to understand social media as it applies to your business. Experiment a little, figure which tools make the most sense for your business and how to harness its awesome power to make it work for you. Utilizing and mastering these tools will dramatically increase the chances of your marketing success.

So Exactly What Is Social Media Marketing? Social Media Marketing is the activity of applying these tools to promote your business, build your brand or expand your web network. Unlike conventional marketing, Social Media marketing does not “interrupt” the consumer, but instead becomes a participatory activity that your targeted audience actually wants to be a part of and contribute to.

By utilizing the strengths of these tools, your business will benefit primarily in three ways:

1. Social Media Marketing will drive Traffic to your web pages. You post a link on a social website or blog or Wiki or Facebook, etc, someone sees it, clicks on it and visits your main website. These sites are extremely popular, so you can generate a lot of targeted traffic quite easily when you know what you’re doing.

2. Social Media Marketing efforts will attract backlinks to your web pages. Those same links you create on Social websites will have high value as Back Links. The major search engines all rank your website based in part on the number of sites that link to you and the PR (Page Rank) quality of those sites.

3. Authority Status on your key subjects – By becoming an “authority”, you will attract more traffic, more search engine visits, higher ranking and of course…more CUSTOMERS!

See our section on Building your Social Media Marketing plan for information on developing a plan for your business that will utilize the top tools in Social Media.

Check our Glossary of Terms for additional information.