INBOUND ACCELERATOR

When you share your business Facebook page with someone, what does the URL look like?

Is it a random jumble of letters and numbers, which may have been assigned by the platform when you first created your page, or is it clear that this Facebook page belongs to you?

If a Clutch survey of small businesses is correct, within the next year more than 85 percent of businesses with 500 or fewer employees, which includes everything from retail boutiques and med spas to home builders, independent accounts and financial advisers, will be using social media. I agree with that prediction, as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and others have changed the landscape of how we connect with one another and share information, for both personal and commercial reasons.

Quick question: When did you create your business Facebook page, Twitter account or Instagram page? Last week? Last year? 2010?

More importantly, when did you last update it?

Social media is no longer an optional piece of any small business marketing strategy. It must be there, in some form. But for small businesses with limits on both how much money and how much time is available to commit to social media, the options can seem overwhelming.

Should you focus on creating ads for Facebook and paying a per-click fee for the opportunity to get your business in front of more eyes, or spend more time on creating organic content (posts, links, videos, etc.) to increase engagement with the followers you already have?

Ready to put your small business in front of the one billion (yes, billion, with a “B”) users of Instagram?

Since you’ll be competing for visibility with roughly half of all small businesses, it is essential that you know how to make your Instagram profile and posts stand out.

What is on your agenda today? If social media management for your company is part of your job description, you need to establish routines for making sure all of the essential tasks are taken care of.

No matter how large or how small your business is, your online reputation matters. It isn’t enough to simply create a website or a couple of social media accounts and post periodically (though you should be doing those things). You need to actively analyze and manage what is said about your business on multiple platforms.

We know that some marketing content just doesn’t last—depending on where you look, the half-life of a tweet is anywhere from just 18 minutes to maybe 2.5 hours. Either way, they aren’t going to be around for long.

But there are ways of extending the life of your tweets and other social media and online content, as the infographic below from Maria Peagler of Social Media Online Classes shows.

We strive to keep this Inbound Accelerator blog loaded with useful information, easy-to-understand infographics, and great insights into inbound marketing, public relations, and all the tactics and strategies involved in bringing those together. But when we published 2-5 posts every week, I know it isn’t always easy for readers to keep up and see every.single.post.

It isn’t always easy to keep a steady stream of content flowing to market your business. That holds true for large corporations, start-ups, SMBs, non-profits and every other iteration of commerce trying to use social media and digital content today.

The content machine is insatiable.