I want to describe some of the benefits social media sites are providing for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Some of the most popular sites include Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and YouTube. However, it does not stop there, as the list of sites is nearly endless with new ones coming on board all the time. Even eBay and Netflix have jumped on the social media bandwagon, allowing users to create social media profiles within their accounts. It probably won’t be too long before every site has some sort of social media or networking aspect built into it. This leads to the question of “What opportunities are available in this space to help SMBs?”

Branding Opportunities

In the same manner that it is important for companies to make sure they have all the various domain names that relate to their brand (.com, .net. .org, etc.), it is now becoming important for companies to make sure they secure their brand on social media sites — at least the popular ones. I’ve written about this subject previously and have made the following statement:

“With all the social networking sites popping up everywhere, the idea of branding comes to mind. Sure, there is the thought of how websites can draw traffic from social networking sites, even sell product or services but in addition to that, what about protecting your brand before someone else beats you to it? This is especially important with respect to user names and unique URLs.”

Typical with most social media sites, once you create a profile, you have a unique URL, where you can access that profile. That URL, if you set it up correctly, will include your brand name (i.e., www.linkedin.com/in/searchrank, www.flickr.com/people/searchrank, etc.). The brand name is also used in the title tag of your profile. Why is this important? Having a number of profiles spread out among various social media sites may help you to have better control over the first three pages of search results for your unique brand name. It also may help users of specific social media sites to find your company if they are actually looking for your brand. Finally, you keep competitors from sitting on your brand and/or people that may misrepresent your brand as I have seen in many cases.

Build Link Popularity

Websites essentially need three things if they are to experience good visibility in the search engines:

• Good content.
• Good SEO.
• Good links.

There are two ways to get links from other sites — naturally, or pay (or beg) for them. Buying them is the easiest, but due to Google’s recent declaration of war on paid links, they can fall prey to their big guns. So, natural is and always has been the best.

One way to obtain natural links is to link back to your original website within the social media sites you set up. Many social media sites will allow you to include a blurb about yourself or your company and in many cases, add a link or links to your sites. Once you get these various social media profiles indexed, they will count as inbound links to your main site. You may even find it useful to include specific anchor text related to keyword phrases you wish to target and point them to pages that have been optimized for those same terms. The bottom line is that social media profiles create opportunities for natural links. Best of all, they’re free!

Attracting Traffic

Depending upon the industry you are in, social media and networking sites can send quality traffic to your site. In one example, music and entertainment entities are successfully using MySpace to attract its millions of users. How many times have you seen movie URLs that are located on the myspace.com domain? Now if you manufacture and sell contemporary furniture, then you may not benefit much from MySpace traffic, seeing its demographic is mostly comprising youth, but you may draw traffic from a photo sharing site like Flickr.

A good strategy is to select sites that are somehow specific to your industry and then let the creative juices flow. The bottom line is that just like millions of people are using search engines everyday, millions of people are using social media and networking sites as well. Creative marketers will discover ways to tap into these users in order to drive additional traffic to their websites.

Interaction with the Public

The reason why it is called “social” is that it allows web users to socialize or interact with each other. This has been one of the biggest fears keeping small- to medium-sized business from embracing social media — the transition from “talking to” customers to “interacting with” customers. SMBs may be afraid that someone is going to talk about their businesses and it may not always be favorable. If this is your fear then I have news for you — consumers are already talking so you might as well join the conversation.

Having the ability to interact with consumers is not just about dealing with bad mojo, but also taking advantage of social media to bring further attention to products, services, company news or even put a personal face on the company. I reveal personal things all the time about myself and my company and have received numerous compliments from clients stating that they feel more comfortable doing business with us due to the fact that they now know something personal about us.

Networking Opportunities

A final reason how SMBs can benefit from social media is the networking opportunities. Trying to be the Lone Ranger of your industry is not always the most productive way of running your business. Personally, I have discovered many benefits from networking with others in my industry and getting well connected. Many social networking media offer opportunities to join specific groups of interest where you can then interact with like-minded people. Facebook is a great example of this — not only can you join groups, you can create new ones, add events and even build interactive applications that run within the Facebook environment.

For me, many of the social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others, have allowed me to develop numerous relationships which are not only beneficial in day-to-day operations, but especially rewarding when attending industry conferences. The conference becomes more like a family reunion than a boring, uninvolved trade show.

Twitter as a Tool

If you have yet to hear about Twitter, I might ask you if you have been living in a cave and for how long. The micro-blogging platform that few knew about a year ago has now gone mainstream with more than six-million users — a number that is growing daily. Even major news outlets such as Fox News, CNN and others are using Twitter on a daily basis to get viewer reaction and create discussion around breaking stories and issues.

This leads me to question whether Twitter can be useful for business or is it simply an outlet to waste time and be counter-productive?

As a small business owner, I have found Twitter to be extremely beneficial for business. Sure there are times I have found it to be an incredible time-waster (depending on what it is keeping you from accomplishing such as actual work, spending time with family, etc.). However, I’d like to focus on how Twitter can be useful to businesses and will cover functions it can serve.

Puts a Human Face on the Company

We already know that blogs are very useful tools to put a face or name to the company — in other words, allow the company to become more personable. The problem with blogs is that they require one to actually write.

Twitter on the other hand is like blogging but has a 140 character limit for each entry you make. You can therefore “say” something without having to write up a lengthy post.

Furthermore, you do not always have to say something that is important or of any real value. You can tweet (term used for adding entries to Twitter) things like, “currently at airport awaiting flight,” or “enjoying a fine bottle of wine right now,” or any other random aspect from your personal life. While tweets such as these may seem trivial, they show that you are a real person behind the corporate entity.

Community Outreach

Twitter is a great tool for reaching out to a community of people. I have seen it used to broadcast Amber alerts, bring attention to charitable causes (when Twitter users turned their avatars pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month), connect with people at specific events (i.e., conferences, parties, local gatherings, etc.), and discuss breaking news to name a few examples.

How can this be useful for business? Keeping in mind that you should work to build a community around your products and/or services anyway, Twitter is a great tool to help in this process. By setting up a Twitter profile for your company and then making sure you invite your active customers and prospects to follow you, you now have a direct connection to them.

And while newsletters, e-newsletters, and even blogs are effective ways to reach out to your community, Twitter offers a way to reach out by saying very little. Let’s face facts — not every client is going to read through a lengthy newsletter or visit every blog post you put out. Short tweets on the other hand are very easy to read and can even call for more action such as inviting clients to read a post or bringing attention to a new product.

Product/Service Promotion

Once you have a decent number of followers, announcing new products and/or services, upgrades or even promotionals becomes a breeze. Also consider that many Twitter users will use specific search queries to locate topics that interest them. Therefore, by associating the right keywords along with your tweets, you can attract those that aren’t even following you.

While product/service promotion can be an attractive use of Twitter, I caution you to make sure it is not the only thing you contribute. Just as in any web forum, blog commenting system or chat environment, if all you ever do is to “toot” your own horn, you may find yourself doing more harm than good.

Brand Management

With so many people using Twitter, there are bound to be occurrences where your company and/or products will be discussed. Twitter’s search function can be an excellent resource for monitoring brand names — when and how they are being discussed.

Simply enter various search terms related to your company brand and product names and see results in real time. Better yet, save each search as an RSS feed and add to your reader. That way anytime someone begins talking about your company on Twitter, you will be notified via your RSS reader.

Polls/Surveys

This is one of the most useful functions of Twitter — the ability to gather feedback via polls, surveys or even by asking a simple question. As a small business owner I have used this function many times to locate tools used in my business, find a solution to a website issue or even learn business sense from those more seasoned than myself.

Using polls and surveys on Twitter can also help you to gather useful intelligence on your products and services. Just be ready for criticism which, if you make good use of it, can be utilized to improve your product and/or service offerings.

Small business owners, don’t be afraid of social media, but rather embrace it. In a lot of ways, it has once again allowed SMBs to compete with the giants. Therefore rather than ignore it (it is not going away), be creative as to how your business might benefit from it.