Social Media and the Small Business

As you may be well aware I had ventured into the world of Twitter some weeks ago and also added a facebook account. I have been investigating the realms of this very exciting side of the internet and have been astonished at just how many social networking sites there are out there.

I don’t want you to think that I spend my whole day typing in links over a variety of different sites, this would just be foolish, oh no, for the tech savvy business owner there are a whole host of tools that you can use to do all of this for you, you just need to go through the initial process of setting up all the accounts yourself, for a fee there are some companies that will do it for you, I preferred to do it myself as some of the sites that you could sign up to are not really designed for our particular type of business.

There are so many things that a small business can do to push their product into the face of the customers rather than waiting like a sitting duck on the net in the possibility that they will come to you, you can do pro active marketing and spend a bit of time pushing your product or you can get the basic set up and do nothing.

Every business requires a degree of effort to get it going so why not investigate the tools that you can use to help. The budget was released but a day ago and I feel that any small business will definitely need to go on the net if it stands any chance of staying strong. Online presence has relatively low overheads and if it does generate you more business then it can only be money well spent.

Posting sites such as Ping.fm will do a lot of the work for you, you create the accounts, post about your business to one place and it sends it all out on your behalf, cant be bad!

BT Customerstreet can be followed on Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Yammer, Bebo and Identi.ca to name but a few, I’m sure I will find more as I go along so maybe I will see you there.

The Mobile Business

The internet generation is on the move, gone are the days when we all used to dream of being able to afford a computer to get on that snail trail of dial up internet and sit for hours on end staring at the computer screen willing it to change to the next page you have chosen, ah those were the days!!!!

Now the internet has moved into the mobile age and the speed of the upload is faster and more furious that ever before, you don’t even have to be sat at your desk confined with wires, the mobile fascination is the way forward and more and more users are signing up to phone contracts that have unlimited internet access, so they can get what they want when they want on the move without the worry of the expensive data download charges.

The tech savvy business will be well aware that revolutionary gadgets such as the smart phone have changed the way a lot of people now operate their day to day lives such as keeping in contact on  social networking sites with their friends, looking for and booking meals, using apps to search for local products and services all at the click of their fingertips on the smallest pieces of kit available on the market.

It is a massive time for change and the way businesses are run is no exception, you can now purchase smart phone applications that enable you to take credit card transactions away from the shop, great for the mobile trader and even better for the customer as more and more people use the plastic instead of the paper for their everyday purchases.

With the news just hitting the headlines that BT will be attempting to roll out fibre optic broadband to two thirds of the UK it gives the nod in the direction of getting on the internet a very prominent issue for the small business.

Why not try a few different social networking ideas, get yourself on Facebook and Twitter and see how other businesses are using this medium to reach out to the masses, especially as this is now easily accessed by your mobile and may I add massively used in this capacity too.

Check out the BT Customerstreet pages on Twitter and feel free to follow.

See you in cyberspace!!