Social Media Engines for Entrepreneurs

So, you don't have a lot of money, but you want to get the word out about your company. You set up a website and now what? These days, your thoughts turn to social media.

Social media is cheap and relatively user-friendly, but doing it effectively requires a good strategy and quite a bit of time. Are you ready to engage in the back-and-forth relationship building that it takes to make Twitter work for you? Is your message something that's going to attract Facebook fans?

I've had the opportunity to work with social media extensively over the last few years, diving into everything from geo-targeted Foursquare to the photo sharing Flickr. While I believe many of these applications can have a place in low-cost promotion, two vehicles stand out to me as having the most benefit relative to the effort required for startup companies.

The first is a blog. Your website can't remain static and a blog is a good way to update content. You can blog about your work, your successes, and trends in your industry. Your blog can have multiple contributors, spreading the responsibility for its maintenance around and allowing your supporters or those vested in your success to learn more about different aspects of your business and the culture of your organization.

Blogs help you with SEO (search engine optimization) and can be fed to Facebook or LinkedIn profiles to keep multiple audiences abreast of your company's work. You can use your blog to answer frequently asked questions about your idea/offering/technology or to relate what you do to topical issues in the news. You can also post links to your blog when participating in online discussions-both establishing yourself as an authority and hopefully driving a little traffic to your site.

But, if you want your blog to enhance your visibility, you need to set it up correctly from the start. Here are a few tips for establishing a blog.

The second is video. Maybe it's a little ironic that I am posting this on a blog, but I wonder how many of us really read anymore. Text messages, sound bite news created for the smartphone age, and social media vehicles that constrain its users to 140 characters seem to be eating away at the adult attention span, now estimated to be just 20 minutes. Concise, simple videos created with inexpensive shoot and share video cameras can also enhance your website and spread your message. Videos capture attention, deliver information in a palatable format, and:

• put a face on your company and promote interaction with your audience (remember the adage...people buy from people, so letting them see a little of your personality actually can do something for your product)
• increase your brand recognition by showcasing case studies, conducting product demonstrations, sharing product testimonials, showing your elevator pitch, recapping a tradeshow or speech, posting a video "q&a" and so on
• drive traffic to your site "Google gives more importance to sites with videos then the sites without video, and increases chances of ranking higher by 50%

Now, clearly not all video is going to be a viral success. There's a lot of content out there -- 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute and YouTube has more than 2 billion views a day. Your facility tour will be competing for the world's attention with patty-caking kitties, Muppet sing-alongs and Old Spice commercials. But if it does something to further tell your tale while keeping your audience engaged with your website even a minute longer, it could be worth it.

That doesn't mean your video has to be long or complex or done by a professional. Learn by our mistakes. JumpStart creates videos primarily to highlight entrepreneurial successes, share entrepreneur's stories and tips with others, and to explain the work we do. We haven't been doing this for long and continue to experiment to find the right length (which is probably always going to be shorter-brevity is king, it seems) for the right audiences. Recently we created a one-minute, simple video message to introduce the JumpStart Entrepreneurial Network-a connected group of entrepreneurial support providers-to Northeast Ohio entrepreneurs. Under a minute in length, this icon-based piece was created for a college design class project and has been one of our most watched videos of all-time. Take a look:

Good luck! Time to add that webcam to your holiday wish list...

Sam Fryberger is the live music-loving, vegetarian Director of Communications at JumpStart. Her background includes advertising, public relations and social media and she has been promoting organizations, events and economic development in Northeast Ohio for more than 15 years.