The social media explosion is not just in the upper echelons of the web. More and more small businesses are getting with the program, knowing that tools like SEO and social media can actually level the playing field between themselves and the big boys.

That is one of the great things about social media marketing and SEO: when done well, a very small website can become very big rather quickly.

Access Markets International (AMI) is predicting that the number of small businesses using social media will increase twofold in the next twelve months. Why do they believe this to be the case? First of all, it is often extremely successful. Second, it is very cost effective. And here are some of the best strategies that can take you to the next level:

Online Video

Think about it: producing videos for YouTube is really not that difficult anymore. Many amateurs even have their own greenscreens and HD cameras now, so producing high-quality content isn’t nearly as expensive as it once was. Placing optimized content on all of the video sites out there (not only YouTube, but Veoh, Justin.tv, and Yahoo Video) will result in extremely effective impressions. Getting clicked on is nice, but having somebody who is actually searching for something you can offer them watching a video produced by you is incredibly valuable.

Social News and Bookmarking

Videos, along with blog content and your site itself can also be plugged into social news and bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious very easily and free of charge. One thing a lot of people don’t realize about Digg is that it doesn’t matter how many Diggs your submitted story gets, it can still rank well for relevant terms even with one Digg. Getting on the front page of Digg is nice, but just submitting every blog post you write to the social news and bookmarking sites gets more of your content out on the web, and basically gives you free links from sites with high authority. Nothing wrong with that.

Building Links to Social Content

Additionally, we are all aware that building links back to your site is a good idea for improving your search rankings. But it’s also a good idea to build links that point to pages on social media sites that positively portray your business and ultimately link back to you. Increasing the search engine ranking of a good story on someone else’s blog, for example, gives searches more ways to find your site. Searchers also may place more authority on a good review by somebody else more than your own site itself. This also has the affect of driving down potentially bad or negatives posts or reviews that rank high enough to cause problems.

The best part about this is that only 5% of all small businesses have ventured out into the social media realm, so there is a lot of uncharted territory out there. The time to start is now.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 8:22 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.