Facebook and Twitter Powerful for Marketing Small Business

Summary

Author of the Home Stager’s Guide to Twitter,  home staging expert Debra Gould, discusses how social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are powerful marketing tools for small business owners.

Facebook and Twitter Powerful for Marketing Small Business

At one time, Facebook might have been nothing more than a meeting place for teenagers and college kids, but those days are gone. There are roughly the same number of people on Facebook today as used the entire Internet a decade ago.

Social media is the ideal way to grow any type of small business, including a home staging business, because it’s an effective form of marketing while costing nothing more than an investment of time.

Staging Diva® and marketing expert Debra Gould says, “If you own a business and you’re already on Facebook for the sole purpose of communicating with your friends and family members, you’re missing out on how powerful this tool is in growing a business.”

A Facebook account is essentially a large, interactive database of friends, acquaintances, former colleagues, family members, etc. You’re able to send a “friend request” to anyone on Facebook so it’s easy to build a big list quickly. Because most of the world is on Facebook you’ll be surprised at who you can find from your target market.

Your database of contacts gives you access to your friends’ photos and you can read your friends interactions with their friends on their “wall” (where most discussions happen on Facebook).

That means your friends’ friends can see what’s going on over on your wall too. And that’s incredibly powerful when you’re talking about your business.

“To promote your home staging or decorating business,” says Debra Gould, founder of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, “all you need to do is publish a new set of before and after photos of a home staging or interior redesign project and write a couple of sentences about the transformation, and all of the people on your list can see them.”

Gould adds, “If they can comment on your photos or on your wall, their friends lists can see that information as well. Suddenly, you’ve exponentially increased the number of people who are aware of your services and have seen a sample of your portfolio.”

It’s true that Facebook is a good way to waste time (especially if you’re playing on FarmVille or doing any number of silly quizzes), but if you use your time differently it can be an outstanding way to grow your business.

Twitter is easier to use than Facebook and requires much less of a time commitment.

In many ways  Twitter is also an even more powerful marketing tool for a small business owner. There is no need to approve friend requests since anyone can follow anyone else (and there is no need to follow them back unless you want to). Twitter offers the ability to search for “tweets” (140 character Twitter posts) on any subject. That makes it a fast way to identify experts on a given topic. Since tweets are indexed by Google they are a powerful way to drive traffic to your own website or blog.

In the Home Stager’s Guide to Twitter Debra Gould provides a comprehensive step-by-step guide to using the free Twitter service to grow a home staging business. Written for total beginners, it also includes more advanced Twitter marketing strategies.

About the author

The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained thousands of home stagers to start and grow their own businesses. Gould created the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers to help home sellers and real estate agents locate staging services in their area