A Template For A Small Business Social Media Presence

Let's start by creating a scenario:

Mitchell and Sons is an estate agency in Rumsey in Countyshire. Tom Mitchell is the boss, and he concentrates on sales, along with Tina, his ace negotiator. His son Tim mainly does rental business. Tanya looks after the administration.

Tom has done quite a lot of research into social media, he even attended one of my Social Media Seminars, and he's decided to start to address the opportunity.

A Blog

The first thing he does is to set up a blog, using Wordpress as the platform. He's surprised at how cheaply he is able to do this, as his only cost is $5.95 a month with Inmotion Hosting. He's able to download a theme that he likes and he soon masters how to work Wordpress.

His aim with the blog is to attract people with a general interest in Rumsey, so he includes all kinds of topics related to the town. He tasks each employee with writing one post a week, with the town as the only theme. He writes about his membership of the local cricket team and his governorship of the school, Tim reports on the local football team, Tina writes about other local businesses and The Rotary Club, and Tanya proves to be an expert in the town's history.

In no time they build up a fascinating site full of useful information about the town, which happens also to be a useful resource for anyone thinking of buying or renting a property there.

Of course, the blog is branded to the company, and there's a big button on there to take people to their main property website.

An Email List

Tom decides to use Aweber for his email list, as it seems to offer exactly what he's looking for. Thanks to the success of the blog, he quickly builds an email list of people genuinely interested in Rumsey. He sets up a blog feed to the list, and occasionally mails subscribers with good value properties they take on or find.

He finds over time that he's being offered much better properties for sale, as the people who are now part of his blog and email community know much more about the business, and value the information they are getting.

Twitter

Tom sets up a Twitter account for each of the team, using their first name and the company name, so Tanya becomes "Tanya - Mitchells" for example. He then assigns each of them to "watch" for some keywords. He goes for "Rumsey" and assigns the others to "House to let Rumsey" "House for sale Rumsey" "Moving to Rumsey" and "Schools in Rumsey."

Each Twitter profile is branded to the business, so that anyone checking it is clear about what they do. When users click the profile link, they are taken to the blog.

He asks each team member to just be helpful to anyone asking for information on the search terms, and to focus on being interesting and interested users of Twitter, as long as they don't spend hours each day on it!

Tom is surprised at how much traffic Twitter brings to the blog, which in turn feeds some into the property site where some of those new readers turn out to be prospects for rentals or sales.

Facebook

Tom uses his own Facebook account to set up a page for the business, and he makes each member of the team an administrator. He adds a feed to the blog, and all the staff post information on there from time to time to interact with all the people who are beginning to "like" the page.

Facebook has a similar effect to Twitter, generating plenty of traffic to the blog from people with a general interest in Rumsey. Only a few are genuine prospects for business, but they are incremental leads that they would never in the past have had.

Fringe Benefits

All this activity has cost Tom very little, in fact he's been able to reduce their offline advertising, so he's actually saving money. He acknowledges that his staff are spending time on producing content and interacting on Twitter and Facebook. For the front line sales people, he's simply replaced time that they previously spent cold calling potential clients, and for Tanya on administration, some of her time has been freed up from checking all the advertising proofs every week.

The big benefit that is so difficult for him to quantify is the increased awareness of his brand in Rumsey. People in the town and people from outside now find the Mitchell and Sons name everywhere when they do a web search for anything to do with Rumsey. His property website traffic is much higher, and the team are getting more leads than they ever have.

And Tom himself is much better known and respected in the town because other businesses are aware of the work he and his team do to generally promote Rumsey and show it in a good light.

Clever stuff, no?