Do it Yourself Social Media Marketing for the Small Business Owner

There are so many options available for marketing techniques for small and large business owners, as well as for freelancers or those intending to promote their own solo ventures. Learning to handle your own social media marketing can save you a lot of other expensive forms of marketing that you may need to get ahead in the competitive nature of business.

If you have achieved your dream of beginning your own small business, you may now need to consider what methods are the most cost and time efficient as well as effective means of marketing your business online. Some are even beginning to determine that social media offers an almost unfair advantage to the small business owner.

Most of the hard work has truly been done for you. With most social medias being very much interconnected these days it is almost always a simple matter of creating an article or review of your product or services and in just a few clicks, sometimes just one, you can have your product advertised on FaceBook, Linkedin, Twitter, Digg, Blogger, Myspace and trust me, the list goes on. Whereas before you may have had to make a singular post or event in each of these forms of social media to gain this much coverage, nowadays if I have to make more than a couple of clicks, I get annoyed. How spoiled we get so quickly!

Twitter has many benefits that may not be apparent to the small business owner who isn't the most adept at knowledge of current technology, because there is one thing that is certain about current technology, it is always on the move. For this reason often a lot of business is actually conducted through PDA's, cell phones and other digital wireless forms of technology, which makes Twitters capabilities a prize in itself.

Twitter, which only allows you around 140 characters or less also offers short URLs to take the place of longer ones which will take up the space you will need to advertise your products or services, or just keep up with the market. It may take some time to build your network on Twitter, but once you have you may be astounded at the influx of information you receive on your targeted niche. One tweet, although limited to 140 characters, can indeed be worth a thousand words to those actively seeking assistance in your designated niche, and this can literally mean thousands of dollars in your pockets too.

FaceBook also allows you to reach out to those who target the same niches you are interested in. I use my FaceBook for business marketing, social gaming, non-profit org information and just about anything I can think of to add. With thousands of readers built up now I have incredible reach into my industry so that when I do make a post, or send one from another social media site to FaceBook, I know those reading my information have a much higher chance of actually utilizing it.

However, do not just use your FaceBook for a spam machine. If you fail to have any interaction with people and constantly spam them, they are likely to remove you. Interacting with your friends list by posting helpful quotes, funny jokes or even playing one or more of the few thousand game applications there will greatly increase your friends list.

Time, it is going to take a bit of time and targeting on your part. When you go to Twitter or FaceBooks search features type in your keywords or the words most closely related to your business or services. You will immediately be shown list of other users who have actually typed or entered your product or service as one of their interest. Add them! It is considered proper etiquette to explain the reason you would like to add them, and often, but not always, this will result in them adding you, or following you in return.

You may get a lot of misses until you perfect some of the strategies for adding people to your social networks. Some of the things that indicate a good candidate for following are:

1. The user has openly displayed an interest in your niche products or services

2. The user has been active recently

3. The user has a nearly equal amount of people they have followed, versus the amount that have followed them. Commonly the closer these numbers are together is an indication of the users regularity in returning adds or follows.

Of course all of your marketing possibilities can depend on just how much time you have to offer, but if you are looking for the shortcut in social marketing for the small business owner, then for the immediate future, looking past social medias for your marketing purposes could be a dire mistake for your long term business.