Is your company suffering from social media anxiety?

You might feel as if the clock is ticking and you're running behind.  But, rest assured, most small businesses, and some larger ones, are still trying to figure out what social media marketing is all about, what's so special about it, and how to implement it.

Relax.  While social media is here to stay as a marketing discipline, it's not all that complicated.  In short, social media is about leveraging your website and the online community to engage with, listen to, and respond to the needs of your customers and prospects.

Word-of-mouth can be a small business' best friend, or worst enemy.  You customers and prospects are talking about you, your products and services.  What they are saying could be driving referrals or driving business away.  If you're not involved in the conversation, you can't capitalize on the benefits of a good reputation, or remedy the effects of a bad one. 

Try implementing some of these free tools to move you forward and eliminate the paralysis you feel:

• Find out what visitors expect from your site - and if they find it.

4Q is a free customer satisfaction survey you can set up and install in minutes with the addition of a few simple lines of code.  Define your questions, decide how often you want the survey to be served up to visitors, and use the reporting features to review and respond to the feedback you get. 

• Start a conversation.

Adding a comment section to your content pages is an easy, low-pressure way to invite your customers to communicate with you.  And for you to respond back with comments of your own.  Most CMS, content management systems, allow easy implementation of comment pages.  But, if your site is still using static html pages, it's still possible to add a comments section.  It might just take a little more work, or the help of a programmer.  Quackit.com offers free code. It's not the prettiest, but it should get you started.

 

• Do some market research.

Again, CMS platforms make adding polls quite easy with any number of free extensions.  If you're still using html pages, Micropoll offers free, simple, and customizable polls you can post to your site by adding a few lines of code.  Or embed them directly into your html.

 

The information you collect using these free tools might cause a different kind of anxiety, depending the feedback you get, but implementing them should be a breeze - and help you get the conversation started.