[Continued…]
Have an Attitude & Be Unique
From the early days of Friendster, to MySpace to Facebook — teens and 20somethings have always been into creating a personality on the web — a facet of the Internet culture a lot of small businesses have yet to tap into, relying too much on RSS feeds, generic newsletters and professional websites to get the word out.

“When it comes to social media, the ability to have the owner of a company directly involved with online conversations about the brand is what gives small businesses a huge advantage over larger corporations, who often (for liability or anxiety reasons) must run all messages past law and PR firms before posting,” says Jill Felska, co-founder of POP! Social Media, Inc. “When this is the case, tweets are days, weeks or even months old by the time they are posted –- and many times no longer relevant to the customer. The ability to be proactive and interactive in this digital age serves small business owners perfectly –- which is why it is to their advantage to get educated and involved on the platform.”

Probably the most important thing a small business can do is to have an engaging, dynamic online persona. No one wants to read a Twitter stream that only deals with menu updates or sales — people want to engage with a brand. In fact, a recent study titled “The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review” estimates that someone who has Liked a brand will spend an average of $71.84 more each year on that brand’s products or services than will someone who has not Liked it on Facebook, for a total average annualized value of $136.38.

As Dallas Lawrence says, “Small businesses should be thinking of [social media] as the new town square. It’s where they can engage in a sustained and regular dialogue. Just as a small businessman knows, you can’t talk to someone one time and close the sale for a lifetime. You need to transfer what you know in the offline space to the online space.”
Therefore, take your in-store personality online. Audrey Marshall, VP of Online Marketing and PR for Somebody’s Mother’s Chocolate Sauce uses Twitter to develop the company’s brand image. “We try to focus on/follow our main demographics (Moms, Food Bloggers, the Specialty Food Industry) and develop conversations with these potential customers or reviewers,” she says. “We tweet things they’d be most interested in hearing, such as mom quotes, our president’s (Lynn Lasher’s) experiences with her children, specialty food news, and other relevant news items that pertains to moms or the food industry.”

In short — every tweet doesn’t need to be shilling your product. In fact, you should keep advertising-esque tweets to a minimum, and keep social interactions in the fore. That’s the way Sammy Davis does it. “I realized in live-casting my excitement, and my energy and my perspective and my personality, I was getting really positive feedback from the digital outlets — whether it was Twitter, Facebook, most recently Foursquare,” Davis says. “When I first started my Facebook fan page I decided I was going to overshare. I try to limit it so that it’s always relevant and entertaining, of course. I want my market to know what I’m doing because they get excited and they feel like they have control over my product.”