In Part One of our Social Media Marketing Series, we covered the fundamentals.  What follows is a checklist of great social sites to leverage along with how to get it going and the content you can put into each spot:

If you haven’t done it already, create a Facebook Page for your business (type “Facebook Pages” into the search box when in your personal Facebook account page to find the section, and then click on the “+ Create Page” button to get started).  Once this is done, the obvious next step is to get people to become “Fans” of your business:

- Ask all of your friends and family

- Run a contest to past customers, complementary businesses, or local organizations to get some fans

- Offer a promotional rate to Facebook fans

- Promote your Page in your website, newsletter, and any other place folks interact with your business

- Also promote your Page on invoices, receipts, business cards, etc. — just something simple will do.

- Become a fan of partner and other local businesses

Once your Page is set up and you’ve begun promoting it, be sure to consistently post content…

About your business, including events, rates,  successes, customer wins, new partners, photos and videos of offerings, links to your blog postings, etc.  If your business sponsors things like the local Little League or the Breast Cancer 3-Day, be sure to highlight that.

About your industry, including links to news articles, blog postings, videos, events and happenings – and your review of them.

About local stuff, including local events and happenings (i.e. the 4th of July Parade), what’s coming up, photos and videos of them, your summary of how they went, etc.

About products or services used before, in conjunction with or after yours, including news article links and links to blog postings, videos, reviews, photos, customer comments and the like.

Also encourage content submission from your Fans, such as…

Q&A with past, upcoming or potential customers.

Customer testimonials describing how great you or your products and services are.

Customer photos or videos of them using your product.

Polls of fans, where you post an open-ended question that encourages engagement and responses

Once your community on Facebook is thriving, always be responsive!  Be active in your community.  Respond to comments and popular items.  Be interactive by using “liking” (the “thumbs-up” feature) and commenting on posts from active community members.

Create a Twitter account for your business if you haven’t already.  Simply go to twitter.com and click the “sign up now” button on their homepage.  A wizard will guide you through getting the account set-up.  When getting set up, enter your own name as the account owner, but use your business name as the Twitter ID (or handle).  So, if your business name is Cookie’s Cupcakes, your Twitter handle could be @CookiesCupcakes or @Cookies-Cupcakes or @Cookies_Cupcakes.  If someone already has claimed your business name (it happens a lot), try adding your local telephone area code to the end of your business name (@CookiesCupcakes415 — which indicates it’s the Cookie’s Cupcakes in San Francisco… BTW: if there’s an actual business out there with this name, our choice of it is purely coincidental!)

If you have a blog on your company website (and you should!), grab a Twitter widget for your blog so your Twitter stream can be highlighted in the sidebar.  Most website developers know how to do this, so ask for help if you need it.

Next up: Get followers!

First, follow Twitter’s suggestions for uploading an address book to see who you already know on Twitter.  You’d be surprised just how many people you already know also have Twitter accounts; once Twitter has revealed these folks, follow them.  In most instances, they’ll follow you back.

Second, use some of the same techniques for acquiring followers as you did with your Facebook page.

Third, follow Twitter accounts who post content related to your business, accounts of partners and accounts of your followers.

Fourth, promote your @UserName handle the same way you would an 800 number, your fax number or your main business number — including your website, business cards, shopping bags, collateral material, promotions and the like.

Once the basic blocking and tackling is done, you should start posting content:

Link Twitter to your mobile or smart phone (follow the instructions on Twitter).  This enables you to quickly and efficiently send tweets out over Twitter on the fly.  If you link your Twitter account to your Facebook Page, anything you tweet via Twitter will also show up as new content on your Facebook Page (thereby killing two birds with one stone … er … feeding two birds with one seed … well, you get the picture.)

Tweet early, tweet often! Tweet “Just opened the store and there were customers already waiting to get in!”  Or “The Little League team we sponsor just won their game.  Woo Hoo!”  Or “Just posted about a new offer that I’m really excited about” and then include the URL of the blog post people should go see.

Don’t worry, be happy. Remember that whatever you tweet can’t be retracted, so stay positive.  Also, don’t worry too much if you don’t get things exactly right in the early days — you’ll to learn how people use Twitter and what the conventional uses of the medium are soon enough.

If you haven’t already, create a YouTube channel.  Simply go to YouTube.com and follow the instruction on the homepage for creating your own channel.

Once your account is created, post videos of product tours, videos of your products in use, tours of your store (if you have one), and the like. Also, post videos of local and industry events.  Another great way to use YouTube is by posting customer testimonial videos.  Encourage customers to take their own videos.  If you use one of the popular, low-cost Flip video cameras (also available in HD), it allows you to automatically upload videos you record to your YouTube channel simply by plugging it into your computer or laptop.  If you use a Macintosh computer or MacBook laptop, use the included video editing software to jazz-up your videos with titles, music and transitions (if you have kids, this can be a great project for them and they often figure out how to do it far faster than their parents!)

Put links to join your YouTube channel on your website, newsletter and other touch points.  And remember it’s easy to embed video in your blog posts.  Be responsive to all comments on your videos. And be sure to promote new video posting through Facebook and Twitter.

If you haven’t already, create a Flickr account.  Post photos of you, your products, your staff, pictures of your products in use, and pictures of products used before and after yours (the idea is to show how they fit with yours or what the end result is.)  Post photos of local and industry events.  As you upload photos, be sure you name them and add tags (they’re like categories) so they can be easily found in searches (for instance, if someone on Flickr is doing a search on “cupcakes” you want Cookie’s Cupcakes to show up in search results, so be sure to name the kind of cupcake you’ve photographed — red velvet, for instance — and tag the photo “cupcake, red velvet”.

Incorporate your Flickr photostream onto your website or blog page.  Include links to follow you on Flickr on your website, newsletter and other touch points.  And be sure to promote all your new photo content through Facebook and Twitter.

Give your own website a social focus. For instance — and this one’s important — start a blog.  And make sure it’s incorporated INTO your website and not part of a blog hosting website with a different domain name than your website’s.  Most website developers know how to do this and can help you to get set up.  Also, you can decide to build your business’s website on a blog hosting platform such as WordPress, which makes incorporating a blog so much easier.  There are many free and low-cost business website templates you can use on WordPress, and there are many website developers who can help you get up and going at a reasonable cost.

Once your blog is up and going, be sure to regularly post to your blog, including product reviews, industry events and news, and  local events and news.  What are questions you get from customers or what issues do they frequently run in to?  Use your blog to address these. Feature videos from your YouTube channel and when you post, insert photos from your Flickr stream — it’s easy to do both and really gives your blog professional flare.

Be sure you also add an RSS feed to your blog — again, WordPress makes this easy and a website development professional can also make this happen for you.  Promote all your blog posts via Facebook and Twitter.  You can use free applications like TweetDeck or Seesmic to make this simple and efficient for you.

Make sure you’ve established a presence for yourself on sites like Yelp, CitySearch, FourSquare and other social / crowd-sourced sites.  Remember that these sites enable your customers to not only find you — as they once did with the Yellow Pages — but to also rate your product or service quality, customer service, responsiveness, and the like.  Such sites can drive a great deal of traffic to your business, but can also kill traffic if lots of people indicate they didn’t appreciate their experience with your company.  Most companies don’t have anything to worry about — it’s only those companies who fail their customers that get into trouble.

Email out a newsletter to everyone on your email list.  Setting up an email newsletter is easy using services like Constant Contact or MailChimp — they include really nice templates you can customize with your own branding and help you to manage all your email lists.  And there’s no need to write something from scratch; simply repurpose content you’ve already developed and published on your blog – and include links to popular videos, photos and tweets from other Twitter users that people have found of interest.  Make sure there are plenty of links in your email newsletter back to relevant sections of you website.

Sign up for Google Alerts and set alerts for your business name and any competitors you may have.  You may also want to set one up for your own name if it is used a lot in conjunction with your business.  Google Alerts tells you when you are mentioned in the news, in people’s blog posts or tweets and and enables you to respond to both positive and negative reviews or comments.

Always send a kind word to someone who speaks of you favorably.

For negative reviews or posts, reach out the poster to learn more and find out how you can improve in the future.  (Be sure to do this non-defensively and without anger.  This is an opportunity to learn from a customer and to grow from negative feedback.  Getting into disagreements or fights with customers — particularly online — can lead to much larger negative consequences.)

It will very likely take some effort to build all this up.  It might seem awkward at first and feel a bit time-consuming.  So take it one step at a time.

Go slow and don’t worry if you feel like you are talking into a black hole for awhile.  Continue brainstorming on that rewards system to get an active community in place.

Once you get into the habit of these forms of communication, it will become second nature and the community that you develop will be rewarding to you professionally and to your bottom line.

Next Up — Part 3:  Social Media Examples That Work

Building a sustainable program of communications with your customers and your prospects is an important strategy for continually driving traffic, leads and / or sales. But I often hear from small business owners they just don’t have the time to do the necessary legwork to foster a multidimensional program.

The good news is technology and web-based services are changing so rapidly, there are lots of great ways to create multiple outbound communications that get the results you’re looking for without a huge investment of time or money.

What follows are ten tips, tricks and strategies for effectively communicating with your prospects and customers.

#1: Produce Once, Reuse Many. Many small business owners fall into the trap of believing every form of outbound communication must be wholly unique. While it may be important to adapt headlines and content length depending upon the medium, it is perfectly acceptable to, say, take a blog post you’ve recently written and use it in an upcoming email newsletter you’re preparing. While there will be some audience overlap, most people are forgiving on this front and you shouldn’t encounter much in the way of objection for re-purposing content across multiple communications channels.

#2: Start an Email Newsletter. Using low cost or free newsletter services such as Constant Contact is a great way for you to stay in touch with both prospects and existing customers (I use Constant Contact for the Yield Newsletter). Be sure to give visitors to your site a visible and easy way to sign up for your newsletter – newsletters are most successful when folks voluntarily opt-in to receive them (for instance, if you look on Yield Software’s Community Pages, you’ll see sign-up boxes on the top and bottom of the page). Sending newsletters to folks who don’t ask for them not only irritates them, it could be breaking the Federal Can-Spam Act. Take a look at newsletters others put out so you can get a sense of what works and what doesn’t from your own point of view. Using Constant Contact, you can set up a simple and attractive template for your newsletter. Try sending a newsletter out every two weeks or so. They don’t require a lot of writing, and you can certainly re-purpose content from your blog, or point to other sources of content you find interesting or useful. And, of course, you should also highlight any special promotions or special offers you have — and link to those pages. (Small pitch: be sure to use the Yield Web Marketing Suite to optimize all your landing pages to ensure you’re getting the best possible conversion-to-sale you can.)

#3: Sign Up for HARO – Help a Reporter Out. This terrific service, founded and run by the highly energetic Peter Shankman, helps to connect reporters and writers working on stories with sources or subject matter experts. Typically, Peter distributes two-to-four emails per day showing the most recent reporter entreaties. Peter also hosts periodic conference calls where he goes over best practices for responding to reporter queries and how best to incorporate PR strategies for your own business. It can be hard to get, but landing a mention – or better yet, a full feature – about your business in a story can drive great awareness about you and traffic to your website.

#4: Set Up a Blog. I’ve encouraged you to do this in other posts and so I’ll say it again: start and maintain a blog. Ideally your blog will be integrated into your main website and URL structure (and not hosted on separate blog hosting platform with a unique URL.) There are enormous SEO benefits to maintaining a blog and it’s a great way to continually reconnect with your customers. Blog posts don’t have to be long and involved – a paragraph each day or two with updates, or links to relevant news or information, or highlighting one of your customers or employees is all it takes. Throw in a few photos from your company’s Flickr stream and before you know it, you’ll be a bona fide blogger!

#5: Set up Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. If you haven’t already, bite the bullet and do this. I guarantee you that your competition either is or very soon will be using these platforms for their business communications. (Take a look at ours as an example – the links are in the right-hand column of our Community Pages.) Some people choose to keep their professional and personal lives separate for each of these services, which is totally fine. Doing this adds a level of management complexity, which is why I don’t distinguish between the two, but I understand why people prefer to keep things separate. Each of these platforms provides excellent networking opportunities for individuals and businesses, and standing on the sidelines looking in just isn’t an option any longer.

#6: Connect Twitter with Social Network Updates. Be sure your Twitter account is linked with the social networking platforms on which you’ve established a presence (i.e. Facebook). A great way to do this is using FriendFeed, which asks you to put in user information for each service. Then, when you post updates to your Twitter stream those same updates will then automatically appear in your Facebook and other update streams. This way, no matter how your customers, friends and family may follow you, they’re getting the same update. And because Twitter enables you to post your updates via your mobile phone, you can be highly efficient with this activity. (Just remember: this is a form of mass communication. Once you’ve hit the “enter” button, you can’t take what you say back!)

#7: Install a Twitter Monitoring Application. While Twitter on its on own is a terrific service, a number of other companies have sprouted up to make using and getting the most out of Twitter a breeze. The two leading desktop apps, TweetDeck and Twhirl, do this using a dashboard feature that enables you to not only do your updates but also to keep track of all those you follow; save searches for your own or your competitor’s business; and monitor tweets pertaining to a specific set of keywords (for instance, if you’re baker, you may want to follow all tweets using the word “bakery”.) I personally use TweetDeck but Twhirl is also hugely popular, too. Both are free and both get better and better each passing month. HootSuite is a Web application that enables you to manage multiple Twitter accounts (for instance, if you keep your personal Twitter account separate from your business and other accounts). HootSuite also allows you to schedule tweets for later broadcast and a bunch of other cool things. If you have an iPhone, check out a cool little app called Tweetie; like HootSuite, it allows you monitor and update multiple accounts via a single interface on your iPhone. Check out each of these and pick the one that feels right for you.

#8. Sign-up for a Press Release Distribution Service. Though most small and growing businesses very rarely issue press releases, when this makes sense for you, a distribution service like BusinessWire or PRWeb is a great way to distribute your release. While not free, the most basic service for each is pretty low cost for local distribution (i.e. San Francisco Bay Area) and hits the major online news sites – which, frankly, is almost all most small businesses really need to do. Distributing the occasional release (which should have real news in them) can be great for SEO and building link-love to your company’s website. Additionally, well-written, relevant and timely releases can capture the attention of reporters and bloggers. Releases can also generate new traffic to your site, so be sure the release includes links to relevant pages on your website that pertain to the news you’re announcing. Ideally there will be a special promotional offer for these visitors.

#9. Use Screencasting. Screencasts are digital recordings of a computer screen. They enable you to capture the interactions you undertake on a website or a Web application as a way of providing a demonstration. Screencasts can also be promotional in nature, highlighting the best places on your website that folks should be sure to check out during their next visit. Most screencasting software not only captures your interactions as they unfold, but also capture your narration – the audio – as you take folks through your online tour. One of my favorite blogs, Mashable, did a great job of listing the leading screencasting tools, most of which are very, very affordable.  Because I use a Mac, I use IShowU, which is a great piece of software for Mac users. Creating screencasts can be fast and easy, and you can create new ones whenever you’d like. Then, feature these on your website, via your blog posts and in your newsletter. You can also send out tweets via Twitter when a new screencast becomes available.

#10: Set Up a YouTube Channel. Anyone can make videos. Even you. Small business owners, in fact, often do so with the help of their kids or close friends. Tape an interview with one of your customers, for instance; or a trip to source new products to sell on your site; or the manufacturing process for your cool, totally unique little doodad. If you’ve created screencasts, you can feature them on your YouTube channel, too. You can then feature the videos in your channel, as well as those from others, on your blog and throughout your website. With quality video recording equipment getting less and less expensive by the day, and with the availability of high-quality, low cost editing software, video production is now a DIY (do it yourself) endeavor. (Buy a Macintosh computer, for instance, and it comes bundled with iMovie, which is a nearly professional, yet easy-to-use video editing software included in the price of the purchase.)

Your time is precious and limited – I understand that. But by choosing the right collection of outbound communications tools for you, it’s very likely you’ll be able to efficiently and effectively stay in touch with customers and prospects. Try starting small and adding new elements to your strategy over time – I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

For more blog posts in our small business marketing strategies series, go here.