Small Business Marketing With Social Media: Learn the topics and strategies you need to increase visibility

Looking for ideas and topics to get you started in small business marketing? The social media sites listed below can help you to come up with the content and strategies necessary to get plugged into social marketing for your small business.

Small businesses are always looking for unique ways to reach their target audience and market their brand. There are some common tools you can find on the web, but a more thorough search will deliver mediums that work a bit better for local businesses. One of the first steps for social marketing success is to identify the right topics and content that will attract your prospective customers’ attention. By making use of the sites and tactics listed below, your lead generation marketing numbers will skyrocket as users search specifically for what you can provide.

Retweetist.com: This site follows all things Twitter and allows you to keep up with popular topics, trends and people by tracking retweets across the site. Follow them with your Twitter account for access, and you will be privy to the most important information and relevant discussions on the web that day.

Popurls.com: This is a one-stop shop where you can find the top entries from multiple sites that users are visiting. Find out what people are interested in and target those audiences based on the latest interests. Incorporate the top entries into your feeds to lead people to your site.

Alltop.com: This online magazine provides a plethora of popular topics on the web, with stories updated by the hour. This site is a relevant source of what is popular in the market place, and boasts easy search tools. It’s a great source for brushing up on new social media tools to keep your marketing strategies fresh and relevant.

Trendhunter.com: This online magazine is an “explosion of cool” and kept up to date by a global network of trendsetters. Get ahead of the game with the next big thing by tracking this site. The reason this site is so valuable is that it helps generate ideas, shape our social context, and stimulate creativity. This is a great way to figure out how to be more influential within your social media marketing and develop services to meet the demands you find on the site.

Trendistic.com: Look to this site in order to find daily trends in Twitter, complete with charts and graphs, and a list of popular topics. Tweak your feeds to be more relevant to the current daily trends and ensure more website traffic.

Twitturly.com: This site ranks and tracks what URL’s people are talking about on Twitter. It’s a quick reference to find out what information gets passed along and what doesn’t. You can also check to see how your information is ranking.

Makeuseof.com: This site has tools and resources that you can use and is a great source for finding anything from the top 5 things to do in an emergency to different ways kids can make money online. Find a significant URL to add value to your postings here.

Lifehacker.com: Another general site similar to makeuseof.com, this site has tips and downloads for everyday life.

Tweetgrid.com: An extension of Twitter, this search dashboard lets you search up to 9 different topics, events, people, groups, phrases, etc in real time. So, when new tweets are created, they will be automatically updated in your grid. This will help you stay relevant with your feeds and allow you to change them as the information deems necessary.

Tweetmeme.com: This site tracks what is cool and being talked about on Twitter. Everything is sorted by rank, so the things that are talked about most have the highest ranking. Tweetmeme.com tracks old and new content, and all media is categorized by blogs, photos, audio, and video. You can perform searches on this site for the highest ranking content and create similar posts that will guarantee traffic.

Twopular.com: This site pulls up trends on Twitter in real time. No need to refresh the page, and you can keep up by always having current information in your posts.

Twitturls.com: Works by grabbing the links that people post in their Twitter feeds and then counts them, scores them, and then lists them. Shows results by day and is refreshed every minute. Through this site you can check out the highest ranking links to see if you can make a posting relevant to your business.

Twitlinks.com: Features latest news that is for the more technologically inclined. Up to the minute tech links. Great for tech marketers who want to find small businesses online and offer solutions to their needs.

Twittersphere.com: A collection of the most hyped stories found on Twitter. Check regularly to see which stories get the most hits. Also a great portal for posting local specials relevant to your business.

Twitscoop.com: An easy way to stay on top of Twitter. Click on one of the words in the cloud map on the right and it shows you how many times the word has appeared in tweets. This is a great calculating tool for keyword research.

Sitevolume.com: Fantastic medium for pulling up keyword counts for 5 various sites. Simply pick a site you want to check, type in up to 5 keywords, and it pulls up how many times those words appear. You can check which words are the most relevant and incorporate them into your social media tools.

Twitgraph.com: Charts your actual usage of twitter complete with visuals. Use this to track what has been the most popular topics in your threads.

Killerstartups.com: Interesting site that reviews 15+ internet startups per day, then the readers vote on which one they think will be a killer. This site can be a great source for being the first to find upcoming needs for your products and services.

Any one of these web-marketing strategies will provide you with many avenues to get the latest topics and information that people are seeking. Because you want to meet a need or fulfill an interest of your prospective customer, it is vital to stay current with popular topics and informational trends. When you appear to be a business in-the-know, you will build credibility for your brand, while reaching a wider spectrum of the public. Keep in mind that it is important to measure your results. Also, make sure that you are having two-way conversations instead of only talking “at” your audience.

Furthermore, it is important to ensure your network is growing. Work on building relationships through credibility, dialogue and content relevancy. By following this structure to market your business, you will be maximizing the power of your social network, and expanding opportunities for your company.

Chris Marentis is a serial entrepreneur and recognized Internet Marketing expert having served as SVP at AOL and CEO of Clearspring Technologies. For more information on Small Business Marketing, go to http://www.surefiresocial.com today.