Top Social Media Questions of Today’s Small Businesses (Part II)

Last week I wrote about group buying services like Groupon, BuyWithMe and LivingSocial for small businesses and about some common reasons why your business’ social media following might be at a standstill and not growing. Check out Part I of my blog for a recap.

This week, I will discuss two other social media questions: one about blogging and the other about SEO. 

Question 3: I am not that great with technology. How can I start blogging?
Blogging has nothing to do with being tech savvy. You can start off with something as simple as Tumblr, which has quite a few themes for small business needs. The user interface is very easy to use. After creating your blog page, all you have to do is input your blog post, choose a few descriptive tags and publish. Two other options that have free themes include WordPress.com (not to be confused with wordpress.org) and Blogger. They also have pretty good tutorials to get you started. Some lightweight CMS solutions include MojoMotor, CushyCMS, GetSimple CMS and Perch. If you want something more, or want to move on to a more sophisticated content management system, try WordPress (wordpress.org), Drupal or ExpressionEngine.
Check out OpenView’s Corporate Blogging eBook for how to go about starting a blogging initiative for your company.
Question 4: How do I improve my business’ search engine optimization?
For those of you who are new to this, you can do the following three things to start with:
1. Make sure to keep your social profiles and URLs consistent with the name of your business. If you are called Great Software, name your social profiles Great Software, not G. Software or some other concoction of the name. As for URLs, make sure to keep them properly designated: www.facebook.com/greatsoftware and www.twitter.com/greatsoftware, for instance. If your URL is taken by someone else, you will have to modify, but do try to keep it as close as possible to the original name of your business, without any crazy abbreviations.
2. Secondly, add links to all your social pages, as this will increase inbound links, or backlinks. Backlinks show search engines how popular your website, blog or social profile is. So, on your business Facebook page, make sure to list your company website, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr accounts. The more backlinks you have, the higher your page rank in the search results will be, as people will be more likely to visit them.
3. Thirdly, keep your content updated and relevant to your industry and your target audience.
OpenView Venture Partners is a Boston based venture capital fund that invests in expansion stage software companies. OpenView Labs is its consulting arm that helps OpenView’s portfolio companies with marketing, sales, market research and recruiting.