Essential Knowledge Series: The Secret to Social Media for Businesses

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Many small businesses are looking at the internet and wondering where and how they should jump aboard this ship of social media. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of networks and platforms out there, especially when it’s unclear how they will actually benefit your destination’s turnover.

So how can you make the leap into social media, and how should you focus your efforts once there?

The Secret to Success: The 80/20 Principle

Many of you will already be familiar with something called the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 principle. For those who aren’t, here’s a quick outline of this idea that truly affects the ways in which you do business.

Basically, the idea is to focus your efforts on the areas that yield the greatest output for your business: the 20% of customers who make up 80% of your sales, or the 20% of marketing spend that yields 80% of the lead generation.

So what happens when you apply the 80/20 principle to social media?

Focused, Effective Social Media

One thing is crucial for small businesses to remember here: don’t try to be everything to everyone. Not only do you lack the resources and time, it’s ineffective. Instead, focus.

Some people will tell you that you need a presence everywhere online. You don’t.

Just focus on those areas where 80% of your customers reside; don’t worry about covering the hundreds of other networks in order to reach out to the remaining individuals.

Where Do I Find The 80%?

Much of your market won’t be too concerned with their social network. This sounds strange in a world where MySpace makes front page headlines, but in all honesty most people aren’t interested in trying out every network under the sun.

They’re connecting through three or four major sites and ignoring pretty much all the rest. Those sites?

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Yes, 20% of your market might be on FourSquare, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Vimeo, Digg, and a myriad others. But chances are they’ll also be on those main sites mentioned above as well.

How to Apply This to Your Business

The simple result of this knowledge is that you should make sure that you’re visible and active on just a few major sites:

• Put some videos on YouTube and let others do the same.
• Create a Facebook group and communicate with those who join.
• Use Twitter to listen and help people who want to connect with you.

That, for most destinations, will be enough. Sure, others may buy into social media more and set up accounts everywhere, but don’t worry about that.

The Tools of the Trade

The key to success in social media is to use the tools in the right way to connect with and help your customers.

And even the least internet-savvy destinations can do that quickly, easily and effectively when the focus is right.

How are you using social media? Do you focus on a few networks or are you getting involved everywhere?