I fit ever so comfortably in the 18-35 prime marketing range. I use social media all day, every day. I'm on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, and I may or may not be slightly addicted to Foursquare. Don't ask me how it happened... but I've landed in the position of social media obsessed.

What is one of the most singularly disappointing feelings for me? The answer is simple — when businesses I frequent aren't on social media, aren't taking advantage of the opportunities that exist, or haven't quite figured out the best way to market themselves in this new medium.

Let's take an example of a typical night out for me, the "can't keep my hands off social media" user. Restaurant A is one of my favorite places to grab a quiet dinner. I love their food, the bill usually doesn't run up too high, and the staff are incredibly friendly and helpful. So I sit down on a Wednesday night to get one of my favorite meals. First, I check-in to Foursquare, hoping and praying for a cool perk for doing so. I say to my Twitter and Facebook followers "Having one of the best meals in New York City @ Restaurant A". Here's an example of a recent Foursquare check-in:

I've told hundreds upon hundreds of people that Restaurant A has some of the best food in town. I place my order, enjoy my hard-earned cocktail, and wait patiently for my food. As my favorite meal ever arrives at the table, I anxiously take out my camera, ready to snap what is sure to be one of the best food photos of all time.

Probably at least. Then I head home, synch my camera up to my laptop, and post the photo I've just taken with a label of where the restaurant was, what I ate, and how great the food was.

With this example, there are four avenues for the establishment to reach out to me as a consumer: Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr (my blog). In fact, there are five since I send my blog posts to my Twitter account once they're published with a URL to the post. Each of these is an opportunity for you, as a business, to reach out to the consumer. In fact, I want to have businesses reach out to me on social networks. Retweet my photo, tell me thanks for checking in, offer a Foursquare special, tell me if I'm such a fan that I should "like" Restaurant A on Facebook.

In the end, this doesn't need to be complicated. The advice I always give to small businesses is to approach social media like you're actually talking to the individual. Don't be stiff, don't talk to me... talk with me, engage, spark my interest. The truth of the matter is that people are doing the hard work for you, all you have to do is acknowledge them.

To wrap up, here are just a few things I'd like to see small businesses do to bring more attention to themselves:

1. Have a Foursquare special. Whether this is just a deal for the mayor (the individual who checks in the most) or a general offer, this will bring people to your door. I've absolutely gone to establishments that wouldn't have crossed my mind because I saw or was alerted to a special there that intrigued me. Foursquare is incredibly powerful and spreading fast, so get in there.

2. Is someone talking about your business on Twitter and Facebook? Respond to them! If I say that Restaurant A seemed off tonight, that I've been there dozens of times but the service was lacking and the food was cold, reach out to me and say you're sorry for my dining experience. The truth is that as a user of social media, I just want to be heard.

3. Pay attention to your Yelp reviews. Thank people privately for their great reviews. If someone leaves a scathing review on your business's page that you think would be best to address publicly, do so. Don't let the conversation go on without you though. Here's an example of how Dr. Bazan of Park Slope eye dealt with a negative review:

Don't be afraid to jump into social media. I, and thousands of others, are waiting for you.

Alexis Lamster

Sometimes what you’re looking for is right in front of your face, you just choose to ignore it.

Some of you will read this sentence and just think of that cheesy romantic movie where the man or woman doesn’t realize that the person they’ve been looking for their entire life has actually been there all along, staring them in the face.  Maybe they don’t want to take the plunge because of a fear of rejection, but they always wait until some happy moment lets them realize what they’ve been missing out on.  And in the end the story sees the happy couple sailing off into the sunset. 

For me, I can’t help but think of the parallels between that quote and the relationship between small businesses and social media.  As I speak with more and more small business owners, they seem to provide feedback along the same lines. 

“Oh I don’t know about all that social media stuff, it just all seems so overwhelming.”

or

“I know we need to get on Facebook and Twitter, but I just don’t think I’m ready yet.”

or

“I want to wait and see if some other businesses have success on it before I jump in.”

I could go on and on.  I get it. It’s always scary to enter new territory when you’re unfamiliar with the surroundings.  But it’s time to pay attention to the numbers that are staring you in the face.

• Over 500 million users of Facebook
• Twitter now has 190 million users tweeting 65 million times a day
• LinkedIn just crossed 70 million users
• Small Businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors

Try to remember way back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s when people were telling you to build a website. You resisted, didn’t you?  And what happened? Some of you may have been late to the game while your competitors built websites that generated traffic to their brands before you.  Let’s not let that happen again.  

If you’re a small business, right now is the “the right time”.  People are already talking about your business somewhere on the internet.  Go be a part of the conversation, listen to what your customers are saying, and engage with them when appropriate. 

So who's out there reading this? Who’s just getting started and can offer some advice on how you took the plunge?

If you would like to see some related posts, let us know in the comments and we’ll be happy to dedicate more time to the subject!

Josh Scherman

What's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Aside from brush your teeth, it's usually check your email. After chatting with small businesses, we realized we could make social media even easier and more convenient.

Starting tomorrow, Postling users will receive a Daily Digest, which will show them all of the things that happened with their accounts over the past 24 hours that may need their attention.

If someone comments on your tweet or blog post, it'll be there. Get a new review on Yelp? It'll also be in your digest email. Each result gives you the option to reply to or re-post, allowing you to see what is important and react quickly. 

Want to receive your daily digest at a different point in the day? Change your email settings here.

As always, we love to hear feedback from our users! Don't hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, or in our forums.

Alexis Lamster | VP of Customers | alexis@postling.com

Last night we had our third Sidewalk Collective event here in NYC. This time we headed to Brooklyn and were graciously hosted by Dr. Bazan from Park Slope Eye. Dr. Bazan did a great job sharing about how he uses Yelp and Facebook Pages for his business. He explained that he uses Yelp to get people into the store, and Facebook as a way to stay connected with those customers. 

Dr. Bazan told us that he started using social media at his old job by writing a blog with all of the information he would want his patients to know. He eventually got fired for that blog, but it helped him realize how powerful social media could be. He spent the next 8 months opening Park Slope Eye and made the commitment to be an all social media business from day one.

There were tons of great tips talked about last night. Dr. Bazan talked about how he uses Yelp and Facebook to encourage a culture of social media in the office. He even uses Yelp when interviewing potential employees. Before they come in for the interview he will ask them to take a look at Park Slope Eye's reviews on Yelp and pick out 3 of their favorites. He sad this gives them a taste of what kind of customer service they expect at Park Slope Eye.

He also talked about the advantages of paying for Yelp (video: Why Dr. Bazan pays for Yelp). Yelp is free for business owners but Park Slope Eye saw an increase when they started putting a little money into Yelp. He even mentioned that it has been so successful for them that they might even start spending more money on Yelp.

He also showed use how to create custom Facebook Page Tabs and landing pages (more detailed info on how to do that in a blog post tomorrow). 

You can view all the video clips from last night here. 

If you would like to host or sponsor a future Sidewalk Collective event in the New York area, please email me at sarah@postling.com. For more information about all of our Sidewalk Collective events, and events in other cities, please contact Jen Rubio at jen@postling.com

Food trucks were one of the first small business industries to really embrace Twitter. It made sense for their business model. The trucks were mobile, and Twitter was an easy and fast way to let their customers know where the trucks would be while on the go. They embraced Twitter fully and there are a few things that all small businesses can learn from them. 

1. Keep your customers updated: Food trucks update their customers all day long letting them know where the trucks will be. But any small business can apply this by simply keeping customers updated via Twitter, whether its about a special deal for the day, a new product that just came in, new features that you are working on, etc. 

2. Feature Twitter prominently on your homepage: These days most small businesses have a Twitter account, but if you went to their website you would never know.

   

   Kogi BBQ has their Twitter stream on the right side of their homepage. This makes it easy for customers to know you are on Twitter and that you regularly update it. There is not use in following a small business on Twitter if they never post updates.  

3. Admit when you are having trouble: When one of the Kogi BBQ trucks got a flat tire they went straight to Twitter to let the customers know that the truck was going to be late.

   

   They kept tweeting updates and let everyone know when the problem was fixed. They also decided to stay late to make sure everyone was able to get food.

   

   If something is going wrong, let your followers know. The other day Butter Lane Cupcakes got shut down for a few days because of a sidewalk violation with the city. They quickly let all their customers know on Twitter. It's better than going quiet on the account. 

4. Be flexible: I see way to many small businesses tweeting the same things every day and being so afraid to mix it up. When food trucks are out on the street they are always tweeting when things change, maybe they have to move locations because of a parade, maybe they run out of a certain flavor of cupcake. No two days of tweets are the same.  

5. Let your customers know you're listening: When I look at a business's Twitter account I will often see that they are not interacting with their customers that are talking about them on Twitter. There are no replies or retweets. But when you take a look at the Twitter accounts of @KogiBBQ, @waffletruck, @RickshawTruck, @curb_cuisine, and so many more, you will see how much they interact with their customers. 

You can tell from their Twitter streams that they really love their customers and are working harder every day to do they best they can to make them happy.  

When most small businesses get started on Twitter many times their main concern is how to get more followers, but small businesses need to be equally concerned with who they are following on Twitter. Listening is just as important as talking, so you should be concerned with who you are listening to. 

So who should you be listening to? Some groups to consider:

1. Influencers in your industry
2. People in your area that could be potential customers
3. Fans of your product that will spread the word to their friends.

You should also identify who your business is currently following, and decide if those are the right people to be listening to.  

There are a few tools that you can use to manage who you are currently following, and find other people to follow. 

ManageFlitter is a tool that makes it simple to identify people on twitter who you may want to unfollow and it makes it easy to unfollow them right from within the tool. 

It shows you people who are not following you back, users without a profile image (often spammers), inactive accounts, talkative accounts and quiet accounts. Based on your preferences you can decide who to unfollow. 

WeFollow is a Twitter Directory that can help you find more people to follow. Users add themselves to the directory by selecting 5 tags to describe their twitter account. You can search through these tags to find users that your business might be interested in listening to. You can view each tag by most influential or most followers. 

You can also search by location. This will allow you to find people to follow in your area. 

How do you decide who your small business should follow on Twitter? 

A picture is worth a thousand words right? So it stands to reason that adding pictures to your small business's tweets and Facebook updates is worth a lot more than 140 characters! Adding photos to your social media strategy can be a great way to add a rich layer of content for your customers to enjoy. People are much more responsive to pictures online than just plain text. 

If you wanted to let people know about the lunch special at your restaurant, instead of simply sending out an update that the lunch special of the day is Stuffed Chicken, why not include a link to a photo of the lunch special. 

You can upload your photos to Flickr or Facebook to share with your followers. If you want to share photos on Twitter, simply post a link to the photo in the tweet. You can use a service like bit.ly to shorten the link to the picture so that it doesn't take up as many characters and to make it easier to track how many people click the photo.  

When taking photos of food make sure the lighting is good and that the food fills up most of the photo. You don't need an expensive camera to take great food photos, it can be as simple taking a photo with a smartphone. 

The iPhone app Camera+ lets you edit your photos right from your phone so that they look their best before you post them online.

If you are in Real Estate you know how important good photos can be. Buyers want to see great photos of properties so that they can get the best idea of the space and invision themselves in it.

A Realtors’ association survey found that when it comes to web features that buyers consider “very useful,” 83 percent cited pictures, 81 percent cited detailed property information and 60 percent cited virtual tours. 

When taking pictures for Real Estate, ignore what I said about food photography. This is one time when you don't want to get closer to what you are trying to photograph. Taking a few steps back or using a wide-angle lens gives the viewer more context and makes the place seem more spacious. You still want to make sure you have a lot of natural light. You want the photos to be bright, so avoid taking pictures of the space at night. 

Posting pictures to Facebook and Twitter can also be great for Retail Stores (take pictures of new inventory when it comes it), Beauty Salons (post before and after pictures of your customers), and many other small businesses. 

Do you know of a creative way to use photography to promote small business? Let us know in the forums or in the comments. 

Sarah Cooley | Community Manager | sarah@postling.com

Postling will be speaking to the Park Slope Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District networking/social media training on Wednesday, July 21st at 9:30 am at Aunt Suzie's restaurant (247 Fifth Avenue). 

We will be joined by our friends Mobile Meteor at the event, who previously sponsored our May Sidewalk Collective event. The discussion will cover what small businesses are doing to expand their business using social media, and how tools like Postling and Mobile Meteor can be used to increase engagement with followers.

The event is free and open to anyone interested, so feel free to spread the word!

To RSVP please email: info@parkslopefifthavenuebid.com.

We hope to see our favorite Brooklyn area businesses there, as well as at Sidewalk Collective on July 20th.

Starting a blog. It can seem daunting, overwhelming and even scary sometimes. So I wanted to take some time to demystify it, and give you a few examples of small businesses that are doing a great job blogging. 

Why should you start a blog for your small business?

Increase the size of your content. Sure it's great sending out tweets to your customers, but what if you have something a little longer than 140 characters to share. Or if you want to share a picture or a video. A blog is a great place to post all of that content in one central location.

Cure Thrift Shop does a great job of this with their blog. They use the Tumblr blogging platform which makes it very easy for them to share photos and videos with their customers and followers. 

Cure Thrift Shop is a philanthropic thrift shop in Manhattan’s East Village benefiting the Diabetes Research Institute and the search for a cure. They use their blog to post updates on our exclusive sales, new furniture arrivals, and one-of-a-kind fashion inspirations.

Have a home base. In need a website for your small business? Why not just start with a blog.

The folks over at Slidin' Thru (Slider Truck) created a Wordpress blog to act as their main website. They do a great job of using the blog to share events that the truck will be at, and pictures from past events.

Also when you decide to use a blog as your main website, you can easily create pages that hold other information about your business. For example, Slidin' Thru created a page for their menu, their weekly schedule, an about us page, and a contact us page. They have created a full featured website with their blog.

Highlight your community.  The folks over at the Roger Smith Hotel already had a great website, but they wanted a place to share content not just about the hotel itself, but about the people in and around it. They wanted to highlight their family of employees, friends and customers that make the Roger Smith Hotel such a special place.

So they created Roger Smith Life, a blog about the life of a New York Art Hotel. On the blog they write about Art, Social Media, Events at the Hotel, Food, and so much more. 

They created a dynamic place online where you can get a sense of the personality of the hotel and the people behind it.

These are just three examples of small businesses that are blogging, but there are so many more. If you are thinking about starting a blog for your small business, my advice is to just do it! Don't spend too much time planning it and building it, just get in there and start creating content. This is the best way to figure out what works for your small business blogging needs. 

If you have any questions about starting a blog for your small business, don't hesitate to ask questions in our forums, or shoot me an email. 

Sarah Cooley | Community Manager | sarah@postling.com

One of the biggest things I hear from small business owners is their fear that they "don't have enough time for social media". It is a huge concern that managing all of the social media will take up their whole day or that they will need to hire a new employee to manage it. 

Managing your social media nay take less time than you think. According to the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which surveyed 1,898 small business owners, the average time commitment was 6 hours per week in order to see results from social media. 

The most interesting thing was that small business owners just getting started with social media indicated that they spend only 1 hour a week managing social media, which the study indicates is not enough time to make a difference. But as time went on, business owners who had been doing it a few months longer, indicated that their time commitment is closer to 10 hours per week. 

The longer you have been using social media, the more time you spend on it because it becomes more integrated into everything you do. 

Here are a few tips to help you get started with spending more time with social media, while making it feel like less of a burden. 

1. Keep it running in the background: Instead of allocating one hour per day to social media all at once, why not try keeping your Postling dashboard up all day.

   I know some business owners who would try and spend an hour in the morning "doing all their social media stuff". The problem with that is that you miss the real time interaction throughout the business day.

   Instead why not try keeping Postling open in the background while you work and checking it every once in a while. You will notice when people reply to your business during the day, and you will be able to respond to them in a timely manner. Your customers will appreciate that. This will help you better integrate social media into your regular work routine. 


2. Take pictures: Posting pictures to facebook and twitter is a really easy way to create online content. This might be as easy as posting a picture of new stock ad it arrives in the store, or tweeting a picture of today's lunch special. The visual content is appealing to your customers and it is much more likely to generate conversations.


3. Use location based tools like Foursquare: Foursquare is a location based application where users "check-in" based on where they are. You make have heard of this tool because as a business you can add specials and deals from within the app that customers will see when they check in to your business.

   But you can also use Foursquare as a user and check-in to places when it relates to your business. For example if you run a rock climbing supply store you can check in when you go rock climbing. This would let your local customers know about great new rock climbing locations near them.

If you have any other tips on how to better integrate the time you spend on social media into your day, please let us know in the comments. 

Sarah Cooley | Community Manager | sarah@postling.com