According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, not surprisingly, small businesses are starting to embrace social media more and more:

Last year, social-media adoption by businesses with fewer than 100 employees doubled to 24% from 12%, says a survey released in January of 2,000 U.S. entrepreneurs from the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC, a Web-services provider in Herndon, Va.

Just because its adoption is on the rise, does that mean social media is right for small businesses? I say that depends on where your customers are. Start with some simple searches to get a feel for where conversations are happening.

A good place to start is setting up alerts through Google or Socialmention.com. Take some time to simply track where the conversation is coming from. Evaluate the tone of the conversations. Are there opportunities for you to contribute, by adding a comment on a blog post or responding to a tweet? Do you see a need for more content or insight from your own blog?

Sometimes people see Twitter and Facebook as massive sites that only large retail corporations with resources can benefit from. When you take a closer look, you see that it’s all in how you use these sites.

As a small business, you probably don’t need to speak to the millions of people on Twitter. You are looking for the thousands or just the few hundreds that may be interested in your product or service. Twitter is what you make of it - you only need to follow the people that matter to your business and hopefully they follow you back and then, voila…you’ve just created your own "twittersphere." Now you just need to spend time getting to know these people and understanding how you can add value to the conversation. (I guarantee you it’s not by sending links to your website 8 times a day.)

You can use a similar strategy with Facebook. Find the people that care about your brand and build a Facebook Page for those people. Target them with ads, provide useful, fun content and get them sharing your page through their social actions (i.e., Jenny commented on a picture on your site, it shows up on her profile and lists in her news feed to her friends).

More to the point, find out where your audience is. Perhaps the best place to speak to them is within a niche network on Ning, where like-minded people discuss specific topics. For example, you could find a group of people supporting autism research or people passionate about skydiving.

Maybe your audience would enjoy seeing videos of your product in use and YouTube makes sense. Perhaps your customers would thrive on earning discounts from checking in through Foursquare. It could be that your customers are looking for specific product scenarios that could be demonstrated on your blog. Or maybe they just want to download your most recent consulting presentation from Slideshare.

With many small businesses, one person may be handling all the marketing or maybe an owner is trying to juggle sales, marketing, accounting and HR all at once. This is where time-management and careful use of resources becomes critical. Utilize tools like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or simply put an egg-timer on your desk and give yourself 45 minutes in the morning and afternoon to work on your social media presence.

Think of it like this… if you treat social media interactions like you are having a face-to-face conversation with one of your customers, you can’t really go wrong. You just need to find out where they are so you can initiate that conversation in the first place.

~ Nicole, Senior Marketing Strategist