In the November, 2011 issue of Inc. Magazine, they had an article entitled “Social Media By The Numbers.” They looked at six social media marketing strategies and made a judgement about whether they are worthwhile.

We’re going to look at each of the techniques and see how we can make use of them for small business. The fourth technique is buying followers.

You can go to Ebay and purchase a few thousand followers for Twitter accounts. The article brought out that many of the followers may be dummy accounts while others may be actual people. Some accounts may not be worth buying because of past Tweets, as well.

This might be an acceptable initial strategy to get your Twitter account loaded up with people targeted by location and interest. Twitter has pretty good return and you’ll get new followers almost every day without having to buy them all the time.

So if you don’t mind spending $50 to $100 to get an initial boost of followers, you can give this a try. If you can be patient and you stay active, your Twitter account should grow over time on its own.

In the November, 2011 issue of Inc. Magazine, they had an article entitled “Social Media By The Numbers.” They looked at six social media marketing strategies and made a judgement about whether they are worthwhile.

We’re going to look at the techniques and see how we can make use of them for small business. This article’s technique is Foursquare Promotions.

Foursquare allows you to reward customers that visit your location often. You may have heard of someone being ‘Mayor’ of your local Starbucks, for instance. They typically get a small discount and this encourages customers to visit your store or restaurant.

The best part is that with or without Foursquare or even a storefront, you can reward customers that promote your business via social media. You could ask them to try a new product and comment once a day on your Facebook page about it. Anyone that does that for 14 days/products gets a gift card, for example.

The advantage to using Foursquare is that your customers must visit your location to keep in the game.

In the November, 2011 issue of Inc. Magazine, they had an article entitled “Social Media By The Numbers.” They looked at six social media marketing strategies and made a judgement about whether they are worthwhile.

We’re going to look at the techniques and see how we can make use of them for small business. This article’s technique is Facebook Promotions.

One company hired a marketing firm to run this promotion and picked up new contacts at a cost of about $1.50 each. This can be done much less expensively if you simply run the promotion from your website and get people talking about it on all your social media.

In the November, 2011 issue of Inc. Magazine, they had an article entitled “Social Media By The Numbers.” They looked at six social media marketing strategies and made a judgement about whether they are worthwhile.

We’re going to look at the techniques and see how we can make use of them for small business.

The first is celebrity tweeting. The idea here is that you pay movie stars and athletes thousands of dollars to promote your company and products on Twitter. Sometimes you can choose a celebrity that ends up doing something controversial, so there are downsides to watch out for.

It’s out of reach for most small business, so make connections with other widely known people in your area on all your social media accounts. This has much the same effect as going to Chamber events and meeting people – except that your conversations can sometimes be found by search engines and help bring people back to your website.

For example, if you can get Twitter conversations going with the Mayor, other people will see the Tweets and follow them back to you. Even better, maybe the Mayor will tell everyone he loves your restaurant (etc.) So if the Mayor sends you a few diners, councilman send you a few, their spouses recommend you, their kids eat at your place… that all adds an extra few dozen customers.

Now expand that out at a pace of a few contacts a week. Tweet to local newscasters, librarians, other restaurants, construction companies, etc. Let your business come up naturally in the conversation. Check back in with everyone from time to time and let the conversation flow.

Over time, this few minutes per day that this will take could add up to far more than a few dozen more customers.