Social Marketing Means Building Relationships

Social marketing means building online relationships that will help strengthen your reputation as a trustworthy person who is concerned about your customers and your community. A small business that wants a successful website cannot ignore social marketing, especially if you’re in a competitive business or market.

Social marketing can drive much more traffic to your site than you could reasonably expect if you’re only concerned about search engine optimization. I’ll mention just two of the social-marketing strategies that small businesses should consider.

Business Blogging

First, your Web designer can set up free blogging software that you can use to let people get to know your business. A blog post doesn’t need to be more than a paragraph or two, but should always link to resources with additional information and to any sources you may have used. See if someone will share the blogging responsibilities with you, and post at least twice a week.

Let’s use an Italian restaurant as an example. You could post an occasional recipe and your comments on it. Give advice about buying ingredients locally — and link to farmers’ markets and Italian groceries in your area. Promote your favorite local charity, or explain what’s going on if there’s a problem with spinach or tomatoes.

You could write about your grandparents or your favorite places in Italy, or interview people who remember the Italian neighborhoods in your town back in the day. If you talk with them while a digital voice recorder is running, you might get a dozen or more short stories you can use on your blog, one at a time. See if you can find some historic photos to go with the stories.

This is social marketing, so be sociable. Once in a while you could write about an entree that one of your competitors does well, talk about how it’s made, and link to his website. Counterintuitive maybe, but good for your reputation, which is a major goal of social marketing.

Use your website to promote your business, but use your blog to share what you know and to let people get to know you. An effective small-business blog is a noncommercial public service site with lots of links.

Encourage your readers to comment on your blog posts. Review comments before they go online so that you can block the spammers and jerks, but think of negative comments as opportunities for you to show how much you care about your customers. If you let people complain and respond to them on your blog with compassion and respect, you’ll do yourself a huge favor.

Social Bookmarking and Content Sharing

Second, you can submit your best — and only your best — website content and blog posts to social bookmarking and content-sharing sites. If you post your recipe for Capellini Madonna and then use social marketing tools to let people know about it, you might get a nice spike in blog traffic and a new customer or two.

Don’t be in a hurry to use social bookmarking tools, because it’s mission-critical to use them correctly. Ask for help, or use the Web to start learning about them yourself.