Small Business Social Media Start-Up Plan

Getting online should be as simple as getting a haircut…
Not as daunting as having a tooth pulled.

My plan ‘The 90-minute web-site’.

It’s not really one website, it is a collection of several interlocked social networking accounts. WordPress.com provides our ‘core’ so to speak. The wordpress publishing platform is being used on roughly 40% of all new websites and has a great community backing it. This very site is running on WordPress technology. WordPress is ‘open-source’ meaning that the code which makes it run is freely available for anyone to modify, study, or distribute.

There are two secondary pieces to our SMM-campaign. You’ve heard of facebook, right? With facebook-pages you can create a ‘mini-facebook-account’ for your small business. This facebook-page let’s you post updates and add photos for your small business just as you would for your own facebook-profile. With the small business social media startup we also set up a twitter account. Then, using your branding (or something we improvise) we style your wordpress blog, facebook page, and twitter profile to look uniform.

What makes this special? The key is that we link your facebook page via the twitter account to you wordpress blog. So you can post a facebook update, that updates your twitter account, and then shows up in your blog’s sidebar.

Remember your wordpress blog is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of this project. You need to be ready to do a little blogging. Blog-Articles can be stories about your business, or simply an ‘about-us’-page. ‘Blog’ is short for ‘weblog’ or online-timeline. You can blog bookmarks, videos, rants&raves, comics, and anything else you can imagine. I am a little biased towards WP blogs… But you can get away with using Blogger if you like.

I would also like you to consider using stumble-upon. StumbleUpon.com is a site that links you to random sites that you may be interested in. For example: If you tell stumble-upon that you are interested in cats, dogs, and birds; and stumble-upon gives you a button to press that takes you to web-sites and photos that are relevant to ‘cats and/or dogs and/or birds’.

Using stumble-upon makes finding fresh content (sites and images) that are relevant to your business an easy task.

To manage your own social-media campaign you will need ::

• A Computer
• Access to the Internet
• an e-mail account
• Basic Computer Skills
• Basic Web Browsing Skills
• Graphics to Promote your Business
• A Commitment to Maintaining Your Web Presence

If you would like additional advice, feel free to contact me.