Driving Social Media Interaction to Small Business Websites

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One aspect that small businesses are very concerned about is finances, especially when it comes to marketing. 

While most of the small businesses might not be able to market their brands like the big wigs of the industry, social media surely gives them a fair opportunity to make it big. From including share buttons on your blog, to adding badges to your site, there are plenty of ways to integrate your small business websites into social media. 

Here are a few simple tips that are ideal for small businesses to generate more traffic to their website without having to spend a fortune.

Images and social media

Studies have shown that people usually tend to respond more to images on social media than any other form of content. As a small business, you must try to leverage this fact to generate traffic to your blog. 

It is recommended to post at least one image on your social media accounts every business day. This image could be of anything between products, trade shows, services, business milestones, conferences, or any other business event.

Leverage Facebook's Graph Search in Your Small Business Social Marketing Efforts

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Analysts have been making a lot of predictions lately about how social media and SEO would join hands in 2013. One of the factors that has been driving this change is Google's search engine strength and it’s ever growing presence on the world wide web. 

Social media platforms are currently under a lot of pressure to come up with some form of SEO integration in order to stay relevant.

Facebook's announcement of Graph Search – a comprehensive search tool - is just an example of how social media is evolving to make room for SEO. With developments quickly changing the SEO landscape, it is even more important for small businesses to understand how Graph Search can change the way social media is looked at and how to use it effectively in their online marketing efforts.

Search redefined – Graph Search

The graph search works by providing search suggestions that include groups, places, pages, apps and also people. 

GooglePlus - An Ally of Small Businesses

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The new kid on the block, GooglePlus, has been making leaps and bounds of progress over the past year and is slowly emerging as one of the favourite hot spots for marketing. It has the potential to become the next big thing as far as social media is concerned. Everybody should be on GooglePlus; small business in particular. If you don't, you risk being left behind.

Fast growing social media site

GooglePlus is one the fastest growing social network at present. It might not have a reach as vast as Facebook yet with just over 400 million users compared to Facebook’s formidable user base of 1 billion. But what is notable is that while Facebook has grown at the rate of about 100 million users per year, GooglePlus has a growth rate nearly 4 times that of Facebook. Although only a quarter of these users are still active on GooglePlus, its user base is growing quickly and with that the number of active user is also growing. Something that is ought to be taken advantage of.

GooglePlus in search results

You might have noticed that Google is increasingly showing results with head-shots  These are just Google's way of saying thank you to those individuals that already have a GooglePlus account.  Any posts from an author in GooglePlus rank higher. These authors can benefit from Google's algorithms. These posts also get clicked on more because people tend to think that these are trusted individuals and industry experts. While some other social signals can also create similar results, the whole process gets easier with a simple GooglePlus account. Make sure that your small business website design includes a GooglePlus badge to ensure a prominent place in SERP