This video is an interview with EVP of Local Social, Brian Q. Smith, and he answers the most common small business social media questions.

This interview covers:
• Will social media help me grow my business?
• What social platform is right for me?
• How often should I post and what should I post?
• Where do I get content?

Transcript first 10 minutes – formatted for easy reading.

We have a lot of questions that seem to come up again and again and we thought would be helpful to hop on the phone with our EVP of Local Social, Brian Q. Smith, to give us some of the answers to questions that seem to come up from small business owners and operators.

Will social media work for me?

Most people running a small business feel like they don’t have time to commit to more “to do” items. They feel that they are preoccupied with upgrading the office photocopier and ensuring their team is productive. What would you tell them?

When starting a business, it’s important to publicize the brand as much as possible to try and increase people’s awareness of the company. This is one of the best ways to grow the business. However, there are other ways of growing a small business. It might also be worth getting in touch with Exos Advisors – Business Growth Consultants, or another company similar, to see if they can help you improve your business operations to become more successful. Whilst that should have a positive impact on your business, it’s still important to consider making use of the social media platforms that could get you many more customers.

Social media success essentially means that you are able to build a community of individuals that have mutual interest and are interested and engaged with your product or service. In this day and age, you should think of your social presence (regardless of platform), as your face to the world – your calling card. In fact, it will be one of the first things that people will find when they research you – before they even reach out to you. Roughly eighty-three percent of all online users today will research your social media presence before they communicate with you directly.

So social will work for you if you can create a robust presence, which includes a good number of followers, and that those are individuals in your target market, based on geography, age, education, or interests and other demographics. You’ll want those individuals to be engaging, watching your posts, commenting, liking, etc. So social does work, but you have to devote a little bit of time and effort to do it.

As well as social media, professional business websites have also been known to be an essential tool in helping the companies growth, as without a website, potential clients won’t have all of the relevant information they need. With a website comes the possibility of being able to look into have some links built for your website; significantly increasing your online traffic. Many people are using this agency, (OutreachPete) or one that is similar to help them do this, and this can be continually fuelled by the use of social media to help get your business up and running. You may also wish to start a blog to go into further detail about who you are and what you offer as a business, as well as comment on trends or other things you notice within your niche. If you’ve never blogged before, fear not, as there are guides out there that you can look at to help build your createwpsite – and then you’ll be able to advertise that on your social media platforms too.

Which social media platforms will work best for my business?

The platform the platforms you want to focus on are the ones that are most appropriate for your target audience. For example, if you own a business in children’s services such as educational testing, tutoring childcare, etc., you want to make sure that you focus on social pages that are appropriate for that audience. Likewise, you might be in retail or real estate or health and wellness. You need to think about where your buyers are on social. The “big four” to consider are:
• Facebook business page
• Twitter
• LinkedIn page
• Google+ (mostly to support your search engine optimization)

Other possible sites include:
• Pinterest
• Instagram

Do I need to have a business Facebook page, or can I just use my personal profile?

The Facebook business page was designed to enable you to promote your business, to have a face to your online audience. There are distinctions between a personal Facebook profile and a business Facebook page.

Your personal Facebook profile is designed for you to have online interaction with friends, family and associates. You share information about you as a person, experiences, opinions, etc.

Facebook business pages are designed for you to promote your business. For example, you can do you can set up a targeted audience, or customized targeting that will enable you to promote your ads to a very specific audience. You can get statistics and information about visitors that’s not available for a personal profile. Yes, you need a Facebook business page and it will give you a very valuable way to make a distinction between you as the person and your business and make it much easier for your prospects and customers to identify with your company, your brand, your product and your services.

Read our blog entry: Can I Use My Personal Facebook for my Business?

Also, when you make your business a page, you become a Facebook “place,” so when people come to
your local store front, they can check-in and spread the word about your business.

Also, on personal profiles, there’s a maximum number of friends – 5,000. Business pages have no maximum.

Get the full interview above.