You’re on Facebook. You’re doing the Twitter. You’re pinning your little heart out on Pinterest… and yet your social media plans for your small business are stalled.

Here’s 10 small changes you can take to make your small business into a social business today!

#1 Let people know you’re social

Use every interaction you make with everyone you meet a chance to become more social. Believe it or not word of mouth was the original social media. Let people know you are on Facebook so they can like you and Twitter so they can follow you.

#2 Take social media off line

Sounds crazy right? But it works. Make sure you have links to your social media account on all of your marketing collateral, your business card, your invoices, your print media advertising, mention it in your radio spots… everywhere. Make it easy for people to find and connect with you.

#3 Email is really social media too

How many emails do you get a day? How many do you send? Each and everyone of those emails is a chance to show off your social skills. Add icons and links to your social media accounts to your email signature and ask people to connect with you.

#4 Stake your claim early

Use consistent names across all social media sites whenever possible so you can be found easily. You’ll also want to claim your name on every new social media site that comes out just in case it takes off. Otherwise you may end up having to get creative later when your brand name is gone and it’s the next big thing.

#5 Set up a Linkedin company profile

Here’s a quick and simple yet powerful social media marketing device that you can setup in minutes. Most small business’s on LinkedIn have profiles for the individual owners and employees but not a company profile. With a company profile you can centralize communications on LinkedIn, offer jobs and have people “follow” your organization for all updates.

#6 Set up a Facebook Brand Page

The same goes with Facebook. If you’re a small business you can’t just have a personal profile, you need a brand page. Why? If for no other reason than analytics. You’ll get a ton of free information about who is visiting your brand page and how you can better engage with them on Facebook and beyond.

#6 Update your website

Does your website suck? It shouldn’t. If you drive a ton of social media traffic to a dead end website don’t expect any real results and don’t expect anyone to come back again either.

#7 start blogging

Nothing.. that’s right NOTHING is better for kick-starting your social media rock star status like blogging. If you don’t have a company blog, you’re basically invisible to Google. And that’s bad.

#8 Get your staff onboard

If you want to do social media you can. If you want to be a social business, then your whole staff needs to be onboard. Get them trained, get them engaged and help them move with you into the world of social media. Odds are they are doing it anyway and some of them may know more about it than you think. Make social a part of everyone’s job and you’ll immediately being to see results both online and offline.

#9 Act social

Does your business have it’s own personality and culture? For most small business it’s the people that make or break the company. The friendly staff, the excellent service, the efficient workmanship, the quality products, this is what people really like. People do business with people, so speak and act like a human being on social media not like a press release.

#10 Don’t over think it

You don’t have a “phone strategy” do you? You don’t have a fax strategy do you? Then why do you need a “social media strategy”. It’s just talking to people after all and you already know how to do that or you wouldn’t be in business. Social media just offers a new set of tools and a new way to reach more and more people. That’s it.

In conclusion…

There you have it. You don’t have to try them all today, but taking action on 3-4 or these suggestions immediately might just be the quick and easy little thing your need to make your business a little more social today.

Have any other tips? We’d love to hear your ideas.

Do you remember the Rubik’s Cube? Of course you do. It’s been around for 25 years and is one of the most popular puzzles of all time. Do you remember the first time you ever got your hands on one and it boggled your mind how anyone could solve this impossible puzzle. It was just so over whelming to people as it was new and we had no experience with it. Well, that is what social media is like. It is new, we don’t have a lot of experience and it boggles people’s minds how anyone can solve it.

Well guess what? People have solved it and are using social media to create awareness, gain clients, increase sales, get more exposure and so much more. Here are a few steps that just might help you solve your Social Media.

First Move – Create a Plan

Social Media is not something that you perfect over night. Like running a marathon, you want to pace yourself because if you go crazy at the beginning you will wear yourself out and even worse you might get frustrated.  You want to create a plan and you have to stick to it. Plan your moves carefully and pay close attention to your results. Find out what works and repeat it. If something does not seem to work after trying it a few times then don’t repeat it. The more you do this the more you will learn what works for you and what doesn’t work for you.  Success is about repetition.

(more…)

At one point or another, every business has made the same comment about social media: “How do I measure the return on my investment?” Allowing employees to take time on social media to talk about the business has real costs, and employers want to be able to quantify those costs with real numbers.

So how does a business measure their return on investment for time spent on social media? According to Social North Chief Idea Officer, it starts with setting goals.

“You have to be really clear what the goals are at the very beginning.”

Setting those goals doesn’t just mean the amount of actual dollars in hand that are expected once your business engages people through a social media platform like Twitter. There is much more that has to be taken into account to truly measure the value of integrating social media into a business marketing plan.

(more…)

 Many companies incorporate a Facebook page to help boost their online presence.  Setting up a page is simple, and it’s easy for employees to promote the page by inviting  their Facebook friends to ‘like’ the page.

But after several days, weeks, and months, many pages find themselves with no new  traffic, despite a significant investment of time in populating the page with interesting  and influential content. The page itself has failed to breach the inner circle of people  originally invited to check it out.

So how do you drive traffic back to your Facebook page? Have a contest? Use an e-mail  blast? Promote it on your website more? Chris Farias, who is an imaginitarian and  partner at Kitestring, suggests that Facebook itself may be the solution.

“I like the ads where you click and they have ‘Like us on our page’, so I’ll go check it out  and see what they’re doing.”

It’s an interesting concept: using social media to drive your presence on social media.  You already know the person uses Facebook, so why not target them directly? Plus, if you have populated your page with valuable and informative content about your business, this type of ad could be what gets your content seen. In addition to that, Facebook is an affordable source of advertising when targeted and messaged properly.

(more…)

Written and performed by the awesomely creative team at Kitesting, produced by Smashing Pixels and filmed and directed by Atomic Spark  Real World 101 is a completely original video short that was premeried at Tweetstock 6.