Many Small Businesses consider multimedia (sound, photos and video) too difficult to do themselves and perhaps too expensive if outsourced. But the truth is, there are several social media resources you can use to promote your business. Sometimes words are not enough to get your message across.
As a small business, there are several reasons you may to use multimedia to promote your business, including:
- Entertainment – If you have music or other entertainment at your site, show it off.
- Product Demos – It should be simple, no zooming, etc.
- Product Reviews – There may be positive reviews already out there you can use.
- Instruction/Training – How to assemble your product, use your site, etc.
- Introduce your Staff – Especially those that are customer-facing.
- Interviews – This is great at customer events, also get customer testimonials
- Video Tour of your Business – This can give customers a sense of what your business is about before they visit.
- Podcasts – Tell behind the scenes stories, describe upcoming product features and benefits.
Video
YouTube is a great resource for small business. You don’t even have to produce video yourself. If there’s an existing one out there that gets your message across, you can embed it in your website or blog. Likewise if you’re already producing video for your site, you should put on YouTube to expand your audience.
YouTube Action Items:
- Start by creating a custom background for your channel.
- Include your company profile in the channel comments setting.
- Use auto-captioning in your videos for the hearing impaired and foreign speakers. It’s an easy process using voice-recognition.
- Quickly remove any negative comments
- Engage with the YouTube community, treat it as a Social Network rather than Video Storage. Subscribe to others, comment on their content.
- Cross-Promote your YouTube video in your site, blog, email, mobile text, any relevant web presence where you can add a link.
Another Video-based social network you should check out is Vimeo. Similar to YouTube in many ways, but smaller. It tends to have better quality playback, and perhaps more focused content. You can assign your video to a group, like “Social Media” and invite friends from your existing Gmail or Yahoo contacts. A great alternative to YouTube.
Photos
Consider starting a Flickr account, posting photos of your company’s events, customers, and products. Flickr allows you to share your images with groups, which can be a geographic region or topic. Posting to groups gets you the most exposure.
Flickr Marketing Tips:
- As mentioned above, find and joint appropriate groups. Also search for your location.
- Use your company name as your screen name. You can also enter Tags and Descriptions with every photo so use them to list your business and products. But don’t use them to hard sell.
- Use best quality photos, remember you’re using these for customers, so blurry or non-relevant photos won’t work.
- Engage with community by commenting on other photos, add favorite photos, and participate in discussions.
- Link from your site to Flickr Photostream – This may get existing Flickr users to add you to their contact list. Also cross-linking generally helps your SEO.
Audio
One of the best sites to share audio in a Social Network is Cinch. There are many cases where your marketing message works better with sound. You can leverage music and effects, pass on reviews from real customers, and speak directly to your customers.
Cinch makes it easy to create and share audio content like podcasts.
You can record your content right from their site and once you give them a phone number you can call it in. They will also search your Facebook and Twitter contacts for followers. You can also use it as a teaser to promote content on your website or blog. Check out what others have done there and see if it can work for your business.
Summary
Once you have created (or hired someone to create) your multimedia marketing content, you’ll want to distribute it to as many social media networks as possible. You also want to use it for business pitches and email communications.
If you’ve used any of these tools to promote your business, please comment below on how it’s worked.