Social networking platforms build buzz, boost business and serve small businesses as low-cost/no-cost marketing tools. Small business owners need to understand how these tools strategically serve and support small business first so they best implement social media strategies to sell products and/or services.

Social Media, simply put, serves users and organizations in marketing in three ways:

1. Communication

Marketing is all about building relationships — relationships start with communication. New web tools like blogging, micro-blogging (Twitter), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning), podcasting (BlogTalkRadio), video distribution (YouTube), event coordination tools (Meetup), wikis (Wikipedia) photo sharing (Flickr, Photobucket), and product review sites (epinions.com) allow small businesses to communicate, educate and share information directly with their current and prospective customers.

Content in the form of blog posts, audio, video, comparison/review sites, tweets and social network messages help share information in a less-formal way that builds the know, like and trust factors that influence decision making. Content is no longer just text. Small businesses can use audio or visual content for a “show me” and “tell me” to make communications a pack more interactive punch.

Social media’s direct communication distinction serves and supports small business as it brings the people you want to attract directly to you and makes direct communication possible. Social Media makes communication a conversation so small business owners can share, receive feedback and connect on equal ground with their target markets.

2. Collaboration

When small businesses empower their target consumers, they feel powerful. When your target market feels powerful, it trusts you, buys from you, and stays with you. Social networking collaboration transforms consumers into “prosumers”. In an era of social media prosumers, it’s people (not companies) who make, shape, or break purchase patterns.

Small businesses can ignite collaboration for marketing by creating their own communities and/or joining communities. By doing so, they can listen and connect to their target customers and build a free forum to bring their market together. Collaboration = Marketing Acceleration.

Social networking collaboration tools like review sites, video sharing sites, blogs, wikis and more allow users to self-serve, collaborate, and potentially serve as an endorser for your small business. Social media works as a marketing tool because people are more likely to trust peers rather than companies.

The power of mass collaboration serves and supports small business owners in a distinct way. Tapping/creating valuable collaborative options can bring people together to share ideas, exchange information, and help each other — and support relationship growth. Removing the “company/client” disconnect can break down elitism and boost marketing mind power.

3. Entertainment

The most important reason that social networking works as a marketing tool is simple — because it’s fun. People want to go where they feel they belong, have a voice, are listened to, and enjoy themselves. Small business owners need to be where their target markets are — and these days, the masses are on Facebook, Ning, Twitter, Linkedin, Photobucket, YouTube and more because it has entertainment value.

Remember the Will It Blend? campaigns by Blendtec? They were a perfect example of social media marketing in brilliant action. Videos were relevant as they showed the product, were entertaining (they blended an iPhone!), and they were viral! People could easily share the fun with friends due to the ease of social media sharing widgets.

You can’t put a dollar amount on free promotion. The way social media stores data as an “Interactive Rolodex” also has an entertainment factor. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are becoming the “new databases” because they are fast, easy, and fun. People are more likely to update their Facebook and LinkedIn information than a sterile address book because it is fun.

Small business owners use social media’s entertainment factor to build their online database of contacts and connections, be visible to prospective customers, and get the word out in creative ways like YouTube videos, blog posts, images, podcasts to make people smile and spread the word.

How Social Networking Helps Small Businesses Sell

Social Media Marketing helps most small businesses boost sales indirectly by increasing relationships. Understanding that social media marketing serves users for communication, collaboration, and entertainment is the first step to considering how to strategically implement the multitude of social media marketing tools and choose the ones that work best for your unique organization.

The key thing that small businesses need to remember when using social media to help sell is that efforts must have value. There has to be value to your content, community, and execution to get people to engage with you or your organization. Social media doesn’t sell things — people sell things. Engaging in social media marketing starts the relationship-building process. Start small and snowball. Social media takes understanding, passion, effort, and commitment to make it work. Give your small business an authentic voice with social media and commit to providing value and you will be off to a smart start.

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There is a lot of stuff to do and remember when starting a new business. It is like a complex recipe with more than 100 ingredients; no two people will follow the recipe the same way. In fact, there are many variations of the recipe as well, depending on the type of business you start and where you live.

Here are some common things that all business will have to do.

1. Decide on a name for your business

The simplest business name is simply your name and your product. For example, Bob’s Burgers or Henry’s Laundromat. This is a nice approach; when you are small, it produces a business name associated with your person, and it can work for large businesses too (think Wal-Mart or Ford Motor Company). These type of names are informative names. Then there are abstract names, or names that suggest meanings. Consider Oracle, the world’s largest database company. The “oracle” is the traditional sense is a person who either tells the future, or gives wise advise. It’s a great name for a software company whose flagship product is about information storage and retrieval. Twitter is another name which invokes the imagery of birds chirping. You can have made up words in your business name, too.

Make your business name flexible. If you call yourself “Farmtown Oil Changes”, what if you expand your business to other locales, or expand your services to include transmission and brake services? Customers who simply see your name might not know you have locations in other areas, or that your car repair services are comprehensive.

A lot of consideration has been given as to whether the domain name was available for a business name, especially in the.com TLD. This is because consumers naturally will first look for a business on the internet with the.com extension at the end. This can be a debatable topic as to whether you want to choose a name if the domain name is taken, but the bigger concern probably is whether you will end up infringing on a trademark, or confusing yourself with another business.

2. Finding out how to reach and communicate with your customers

Businesses generally will need to find ways to reach their customers both for marketing and product development purposes. Imagine you are forming a local bakery. What kind of bakery are you aiming to be? Are you a bakery whose primary traffic is going to come from walk-in customers who happen to walk by your storefront, or do you wish to serve primarily catering or call-in orders? “All of the above”, you might say. Everyone wants to be all of the above, and get every type of customer, however may you want to focus on a type of customer. If you are catering, you will want to market yourself not only to customers directly, but also wedding planners, caterers, and other bakeries who may not be able to handle higher volumes. In addition, real estate agents or PTAs may need your services. Maybe local restaurants. These types of marketing channels may or may not be different than for the channels for retail customers. The marketing messages in these channels may be different.

As far a customer research, these days online is one of the best ways to find out what customers want. The aforementioned Twitter, along with Facebook, and the myriad of blogs and forums allow business owners to find out customer desires. One key point about finding out what customers want is not to ignore what you don’t want to hear. You may realize that the solution you are offering is being criticized, or will not meet the needs of your market. This is invaluable when starting a new business.

Doing small advertising runs online will also help you gauge customer reaction to your idea. The sales funnel though, has many detours. You will need an advertisement which attracts clicks, a web page which markets correctly and explains the benefits, and working sites and links all in between. All of these are failure points which have nothing to do with the actual service or product you are marketing. The point is to make sure that you put your best foot forward so the reaction you get is measuring what you want.

3. Organize yourself and Administration of the Business

Business owners always have an incomplete list of things to complete, along with new ideas in their heads, plus customer problems to solve. Getting organized early when starting a new business can help you smooth your business operations and clear your mind to focus on more important business problems. Organization is overhead. It does not directly contribute to the bottom line of the business, however lack of organization can hinder your efforts.

For some owners, organization is not a problem. They are naturally attracted to lists, writing, and logging details of their operations. For those who have trouble getting organized, I would suggest to take behavioral changes slowly, or see if you can hire someone to help with organization.

It is not necessary to have tracking or time management software to get your business organized. Large business existed one hundred years ago before computers were invented. However, you do want to make sure your operational efficiency is up to par with your competitors. The more parts you have to your business, the more communication you need to do effectively.

For a small organization, start with a well known method such as Getting Things Done by David Allen. This is a very well-known, modern method to productivity. There are other similar books in the field. For project or product management tools, paid tools such as Basecamp, as well as free software tools such as Trac or Redmine are available.

Aside from naming, marketing, and organization, people starting a new business face a myriad of challenges and requirements. The business should always keep in mind its objective, and take a just-in-time approach to solving problems to remain efficient.

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In the internet world of abundance, internet entrepreneurs attempt to stimulate demand for their products and services. The internet marketplace is flooded with numerous products and product variations, services providers, and ‘how to’ ideas of thousand of internet experts. This has led to individuals having a wide choice regarding which particular product or service among many he will purchase or subscribe to respectively, to satisfy his wants.

Since most online buyers and prospects are faced with this problem of choice each time they want to make an online purchase, they tend to favor the product or service that, within their individual limited experience, has yielded the greatest amount of satisfaction in the past. In order to compete with these online buyer loyalties toward products, services, or ideas already established in the internet marketplace, online business owners, services providers, and information marketers must distribute information about their offerings though various internet marketing and advertising media vehicles.

Do a little research online on companies and individuals offering internet marketing, or web sites designing services and you will discover that there are a lot of them. So fully established, some partially, while others, not at all. Now what is the fate of new individual or firm trying to join the internet marketplace and offering any of those services? Most of them usually gain converts slowly, if at all, because the major providers of such services have spent thousands of dollars in persuading customers and prospects to subscribe and use their services. These marketing and promotional expenditures have been justified, as evidenced by the continual rising of internet marketing budget, as compared to offline media vehicles such as television, radio, and newspapers.

Web business owners and internet entrepreneurs can try to overcome online customers’ resistance toward market offerings by learning as much as they can about internet marketing or hire a company that specializes in internet marketing to help them market their web businesses.

Internet marketing tools and media vehicles web business owners can learn how to use include banner ads, forums, blogs, social networking sites, RSS distribution, text-link ads, e-mail, autoresponders, PPC ads, search engines, article marketing, web directories, and social bookmarking sites.

Marketing your web business is very important if you really want to be successful selling your products, services, or ideas on the internet, so it is very advisable to learn as much as you can about internet marketing, or hire a company that specializes in internet marketing and advertising to partner with you in marketing your business online.

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Chula Vista, California is a great place to start a business. The attorneys in the area know that operating a business alone or with others is an important step in your life, and you need legal advice before you begin. The opening of a new business in any area is great to help the economy, but in Chula Vista the economy helps new business owners. You need to make sure that you get a Business Attorney to help you plan and advise you on starting up your business.

One of the many things that an attorney can do is to help you form a corporation, or an LLC, to make sure that your own personal life is kept separate from that of the business. You may be a sole proprietor, or have a partner, but if things go array you do not want to lose your personal things in a law suit. That is why it is very vital to have an attorney to help you with all the legal documents.

In Chula Vista, which is a part of Orange County, there are groups that help the entrepreneur with a business start-up. This is very good because you know the area is ripe for new business, and there is support to help you. No matter what type of business that you plan on starting, an attorney will help you with all the important paper work and help to advise you on important legal matters.

One of the concerns that new business owners have is the tax advantages that are offered to new business owners. One of the major things that are important in the Chula Vista area is that you can get tax deductible benefits when you incorporate your business in Orange county. These are all very important matters that will help your business to grow successfully.

While looking for an attorney to help you with your start-up business, check out his status in the Chula Vista community. Make sure that they have been in the Chula Vista area for a while doing business. You want to know the attorney’s victory rate when it comes to handling court cases concerning business related problems. You should find out what they’re going rate of pay is, their retainer fee, and if they will negotiate with you at least in your first formative years of business. Many attorneys will work for a yearly fee while others need a retainer fee for each specific job function.

Then of course you do need to make sure that your attorney will be available when you need them during special times of the year like tax time. When you need to ask advice, makes sure that you have the type of attorney that will answer your phone calls. A good Business Law attorney knows the zoning ordinances and can assist you when it comes to expanding your company. There are many important procedures that need to be done in order to start up your business that is why it is fundamental that you have an attorney to help you make the right decisions.

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