Print advertising has been the long-standing tradition for small businesses for decades. I have been designing print material for the past 15 years and primarily work with small businesses to make print advertising successful. Most small businesses look to print advertising as the first choice in advertising their business. This tradition is changing, small businesses in the past five years are using less and less print advertising than ever before. The catalyst that has caused this is the Internet. The Internet has made it easier and cheaper for small businesses to promote themselves to the mass audiences. In the past it was very difficult to track your advertising through print, radio and television. Today with the Internet it is much easier with services like Google analytics and Google Webmaster tools, compete.com,  and Alexis.com.. These great services give you factual information and real-time insight into the traffic and geographic location of consumers that are visiting your website.

In the past five years the introduction of social media services like Facebook and twitter have made it even easier to track performance, demographics and other analytical information about users in services like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, delicious, ping.fm and more.

I help clients with setting up and promoting their businesses online with these types of social media. They are highly effective and the largest investment into these is your time. I recommend that people set a schedule each month of how they are going to promote their business online with these social media services. I recommend to people that they either pick a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly schedule that they post to these social media outlets about their business promotions sales and events that are going on. One of the key factors in using social media is consistency. Without a consistent schedule in using social media you are shooting yourself in the foot and it is going to be counterproductive. I have seen clients set up Facebook under the wrong type of service page and use it for the wrong purposes and wrong ways.

With Facebook there are rules and guidelines that you should follow to be consistent and effective with your potential customers. The first thing that I would recommend to people when using Facebook is don’t talk about your personal life on your business page. It is okay to share your opinion in a professional and businesslike manner on Facebook, but you want to keep it focused on your business and what your consumers are interested in about your business. The danger of sharing too much information about your personal life is you confuse your potential customers about your business. The other danger of sharing personal information on your Facebook business page is people will think that is your personal page and not your business. That is why I try to educate my customers about how to use Facebook to promote their business.

Twitter is another great source of social media to encourage people to follow your business. Twitter is a little bit different from Facebook, with twitter you are allowed to type than 140 characters. With Facebook you’re allowed 420 characters, there is a way around the 420 character cap on wall posts and status updates.here is a little bit of insight into how to put more than 420 characters on your wall posts and status updates.

1. Load a new photo into Facebook with the Facebook upload tool. Do this from your page and you will be associated as the owner of that photo, when you do this you can also tag other people in the photo.

2. Once the photo has uploaded you can add a description to the photo and this is where you can add more than 420 characters.

3. Once you have uploaded the photo you can then tag other people in the photo.

That’s all for today! Happy social media posting

Fred

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