How many of you are using social media to promote your business?
Post links here and grow your following.

Here's Ours:
Facebook - [Link: facebook.com]
Twitter - Safe_n_Sound_

What else are you using?

I liked your fb page yesterday. Good job with the content. I have had mine up and running for a bit but not many followers outside of industry guys, friends, and family that inevitable comment on my posts with replies that make my biz seem small time. Like "I'll take 2 if their free, love your sis". Not much of my clientele is on fb but having the link on my website has taken prospective clients there to see more samples of our work. I also think its a good place to fine tune the image of your business. Doesn't hurt to have friends have a better understanding of what we do either which has lead to referrals.

[Link: facebook.com]

We also try a monthly email that includes new product and an "install of the month" and try to relate the two to the season.

My big push now is yelp. Usually small jobs but keeps the crew busy. Yelp had great seo and the more high rated stars the better your position on google.

Personally don't see a huge upside to twitter but do see a potential to waste large amounts of time. If I was a celebrity or publisher maybe twitter would be more affective.

Need to learn more about linked in. Probably a better networking than marketing site but networking is crucial for business growth as well.

We want to use it more but we haven't made the time commitment to get it rolling strong.

Here is what we have now....
[Link: facebook.com]
Twitter @scilv

Twitter gets so noisy once you start following a lot of people. I rarely bother with it. My family and friends were using it a lot last year but all of them have stopped with no updates in months. I dont think it will land you any work. It may help with networking (builders, interior designers, manufacturers). Want to add it to your "socialize" drop down?

Facebook is a different story. Every time i spam my warez at Facebook i get an email about a website or GUI. As long as you keep the posts on point and avoid the "flood the stream" mentality it will help make people aware of you and provide you with leads. Also... i have been looking around for a place to paint my car. I kept reading reviews about a local maaco. That location has a facebook page with photos of their work. I was able to go and see what sort of cars they were working with and read comments from their clients. Without that facebook page they would have just been the "cheap place" that everyone told me to avoid instead of the less expensive place that does a great job.

Two other things you should look at. Put up a blog and write about your projects or products... writing articles for other (well known) blogs and sites like CEPro/Electronic House. Home owners are hitting the web now to research everything before they buy. Its not just cheap people who want to try and cheat the system. Its becoming second nature to look everything up before we leave the house. The time, the weather, the directions, products, features, msrp, whos installing product X in my area... Every entry adds content and substance to your brand.

Avoid the "we are better than big box because we care about the client" novels. People don't want to hear our sales pitch before they meet us. They want information. They want photos and video of what you can do so that they can imagine it in their home. Have your facebook/blog briefly tell people and then show them what you can do.

Today i spent 30 minutes looking at local car audio places online. I am having a power problem with the head unit in my car and i cant figure out it so i want to drop it off somewhere and let them handle it for me. Not 1 of the closest 5 places has a website. The only website is for a place an hour away and his site sucks. So... are these companies all great and they just havent had time to put up or update their website? Or are they all hillbilly operations that will destroy my car and charge me for the pleasure? Drives me insane. People complain about no work or a down market and here i am trying to spend money with people who wont help me choose them.

[Link: facebook.com]

We had a bit of a 'misunderstanding' with our site developer. We were promised an easy to admin site with great creative input. It makes me vomit in my mouth when I look at it now...

We have at least a dozen or so clients that reach out via FB and to be honest- I kind of dig it.

fb: [Link: facebook.com]
twitter: [Link: twitter.com]

Are you using wordpress? IMO this is the way to go if you wan the ability to update your own site on a regular basis. The primary reason is that you can head over to youtube and watch howto videos to learn how to navigate everything in wordpress. Anyone who can post at a forum or write an email will have the ability to update the site once its been configured.

Configuring wordpress can be a pain though. Every template is a custom one-of hack. After you configure a dozen or so you start to see the patterns in terms of how they have hacked it but its still a pita. Once its all set up its painless to edit the content. Customizing the template is also difficult unless you know php (which i don't). Its similar enough to html for me to figure things out but it takes forever. Best thing to do is look for a wordpress template that has lots of built in features/page type layouts so that you dont have to customize anything.


I am up in the air about this issue right now.

Do we...

Have a super basic site with contact info, provided services bullet points and limited gallery... and links to facebook where we update daily and upload new photos and videos

Or do we...

Use facebook as a lead tool and put the energy/content into our own websites.

Perfect example. Customers can find you, see your work and sell themselves on the idea of using you.

Out of a dozen car audio places near me none of them have a website or facebook account. Insane.

Regarding Blog sites, Ive been looking into this but havent had tine to jump in. Its allows you to create a blog that is attached to one of those QR codes.

Interesting: http://www.kaywa.com/

Social media can be a great marketing tool. The problem is, it takes a commitment to get started with it. Facebook and Twitter don't do much good if you don't have a following. Achieving that takes time and energy. You can certainly half-ass it and just let your page sit there and accumulate followers organically, but that's a very slow process and you're really just wasting your time, IMO. It doesn't do any good if you're not reaching anyone.

On top of that, you need relevant, fresh content posted on a consistent basis to feed the followers. "Consistent" is somewhat of a relative term here. Stamp touched on it a little, but you don't want to overload followers to the point that they look past what you have to say. Conversely, if you never post anything, there's no motivation to follow.

Generally speaking, business owners and current employees already have enough to do without taking on the extra responsibility of installing a social media marketing initiative, but it's not enough of a responsibility to bring on an extra person. I think it's definitely worth it, but you have to balance a lot of factors in implementing it.

Corey, Your site is doing fine. You just have to try and find something daily or every couple of days to generate interest and draw people. It took us a while to figure it out and we have a long way to go but it seems to be getting far more traffic these days.


Excellent idea!


I need to check that out.

Guys, there are some great Facebook pages on here. I hope to get some ideas from them. We're no experts but we are doing pretty well with ours so if I can help anybody I'd be happy to.

If you have time to tweet... you have time to be doing something else (that makes money).

QR codes can point to just about anything or to nothing at all. They can be used just to display a message. Takes less than 2 minutes to generate one. Oh, and currently there are about 14 people on earth using them...