There is a lot of news these days on how small com­pa­nies are using social media to drive their busi­ness. Some of the most out­stand­ing suc­cess sto­ries are all the talk, such as food trucks that attribute 80% of their growth to Twitter.

How does a small com­pany begin to use the social web in ways that will incre­men­tally build sales?

The first area a small busi­ness should build out is the online pres­ence. How friendly is your online front door? Potential cus­tomers are rely­ing on two web areas to dis­cover new busi­nesses and prod­ucts; friend rec­om­men­da­tions and ease of smart phone search. Let us look at how a small busi­ness, in one hour, can build out these opportunities.

Yelp – By far the largest peer rec­om­mended review site, small busi­nesses should put their basic busi­ness infor­ma­tion here: busi­ness hours, loca­tion, a few pic­tures, menu and phone num­ber. Don’t be afraid to pos­i­tively respond to any neg­a­tive reviews – 98% of small busi­nesses never respond to reviews and this will be seen in a very pos­i­tive light by the Yelp com­mu­nity (you will have to “claim” your busi­ness to do so).

Google Places – Google is still the web’s dom­i­nant search engine and Google Places is free. Like Yelp, all the basic infor­ma­tion can be put here: hours, loca­tion, pic­tures, phone and other infor­ma­tion. For nom­i­nal fees, you can add videos and other con­tent to make your busi­ness stand out.

Wikipedia – Not often thought of, but with a huge impact, cre­at­ing a Wikipedia entry for a busi­ness only takes a few min­utes. A busi­ness can pro­vide deeper infor­ma­tion in Wikipedia than in other sites and cross-link it to other entries (deep­en­ing the search engine rank­ings for the busi­ness).
Urbanspoon – Urbanspoon is graph­i­cally more user-intuitive than Yelp and specif­i­cally focused on the hos­pi­tal­ity indus­try. Again, free for the most part, it only takes a few min­utes to get all the nec­es­sary busi­ness infor­ma­tion entered: loca­tion, hours, con­tact info, menu and pictures.

Facebook Fanpage – A bit more time is required to cre­ate a Fanpage, but with Fanpages new abil­ity to “act” in Facebook as a user – mean­ing a busi­ness can com­ment on other pages and inter­act with peo­ple, Fanpages have become a nec­es­sary tool in not only dri­ving new busi­ness, but also con­nect­ing with cur­rent cus­tomers. Creating a basic Fanpage should take about fif­teen to twenty min­utes. Make sure to put your hours, phone, loca­tion and brief busi­ness descrip­tion in the infor­ma­tion sec­tion. Linking to a Twitter account, Wikipedia entry and other sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon will only increase the abil­ity to place high in search engine rankings.

Facebook Places – Similar to Google Places, Facebook Places offers small busi­nesses addi­tional search engine expo­sure. Facebook Places, like Foursquare and Gowalla, are geo-location web tools, mean­ing peo­ple “check in” to your busi­ness through their smart phone, shar­ing tips and pic­tures of your busi­ness with their friends – that is clas­sic and pow­er­ful peer recommendation!

Foursquare – Another geo-location tool, Foursquare allows con­sumers to check in to a busi­ness, shar­ing tips, pic­tures and their rec­om­men­da­tions on the business’s prod­ucts and ser­vices. Creating a busi­ness venue is easy and if the busi­ness “claims” itself, it can offer spe­cial deals to peo­ple who check-in.

Twitter – A great way to describe Twitter is that it is much like CB Radio. Creating a Twitter pro­file doesn’t take that long and it’s free. Here’s the advan­tage – every time a busi­ness tweets, either respond­ing to some­one or pro­duc­ing a new mes­sage, it cre­ates another piece of data for search engines to con­sider when peo­ple search for, say, “cof­fee”. Another advan­tage to Twitter is a busi­ness can use search out poten­tial cus­tomers through var­i­ous tools: Twitter search, Twellow.com (the Twitter Yellow pages) or other applications.

Youtube – Youtube has become the sec­ond most used search engine inter­na­tion­ally. A busi­ness that pro­duces a short video a week will quickly gen­er­ate con­sid­er­able con­tent that is dis­cov­ered by poten­tial and exist­ing cus­tomers – either search­ing in Youtube or through search engines. Another free ser­vice that only takes a lit­tle bit of time, a busi­ness can also cre­ate a Youtube chan­nel, fur­ther exploit­ing the dis­cov­er­abil­ity in web searches. Make sure you “tag” the videos with appro­pri­ate key­words and descriptions.

Spending an hour a week devel­op­ing these nine web-based touch-points are cer­tain to help you build busi­ness. Do not expect instant results – it will take a cou­ple months or more before you really begin to see results. Just remem­ber that you are cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for new and exist­ing cus­tomers to be in rela­tion­ship with you, when they are not phys­i­cally in your store. Pay atten­tion to the com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the return on your time and invest­ment will reward your business.

Got ques­tions? You can find me on Twitter every day at @JeffreyJKingman or via my company’s web pres­ence front door at www.chalkboarder.com.