low cost

A Guide to Facebook Social Plugins for Small Business

Since Facebook announced their Open Graph API and new social plugins, there has been a lot of attention and concern about how much privacy Facebook really provides. For small businesses though, understanding the capabilities of these new plugins is critical. The "Guide to Facebook Social Plugins for Small Business" posted on the American Express Open Forum does a great job of showing how to use these plugins effectively in your business today. Visit the American Express Open Forum here to read more.

Social Media in Business - Retail Stores

Facebook, blogs, Twitter and customer reviews are considered the most effective tactics for mobilizing consumers to talk up products online. (Etailing survey of 117 companies, September 2009)

90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust opinions of unknown users. (Econsultancy, July 2009)

Between 10% and 24% of US social media users turned to social networks when making purchase decisions about various categories of products and services. (eMarketer, October 2009) Read more »

Social Media in Business - Real Estate

Americans tripled the amount of time they spent on social networking sites in 2009 and these sites now account for 17% of all time spent on the Internet.1 

There are more than 350,000,000 Facebook users, half of whom log in at least once per day.  The average user spends 55 minutes per day on Facebook.2

The average household income of LinkedIn users is $107,278.3 Read more »

Do I Have to Tweet?

Mention Twitter in conversation and you’ll likely hear responses that range from “Twitter is just another fad I don’t have time for” all the way to “Twitter is absolutely essential to my business.”  Some people will tell you that everyone has to be on Twitter.  The reality is that not everyone needs to be on Twitter.  If you want to join purely to talk to friends and have fun on a personal level, go for it.  If you are considering Twitter from a business perspective, consider these questions:  Read more »

Do I Need a Facebook Fan Page?

Are my customers or prospects on Facebook?

Do I have good content to share?

Can my customers benefit from interaction with each other?

Do I want another place where my company can be found?

Do I want to easily keep my brand in front of people?

If you can answer “yes” to even some of those questions, then yes, you probably do need a Facebook fan page.  According to Facebook, profiles are for individual people and “pages are for organizations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner.”  If you have created a profile for your business rather than a page, you are violating Facebook’s terms of service and they can disable your business profile page at any time.  An easy way to tell the difference is profiles can request friends and pages can not.  Read more »

4 More Tips for Marketing on a Limited Budget

We talked about four marketing tactics that required little or no financial cost in a previous post, and after writing that post, we came up with four more. As with the others, keep in mind the time investment required by each of these and make sure you are willing to make it. Read more »

4 Tips for Marketing on a Limited Budget

Marketing is an essential function of any business. Tactics vary, messages vary, and budget varies, but all businesses must market in some way. Some businesses have millions to spend on marketing and some have just hundreds or maybe thousands. If you have a very limited budget, consider these four low-cost or no-cost ideas for effectively marketing your business. Read more »