Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Etc.

[matt819]

I realize that this group doesn't get a lot of traffic, but for those of you who are here, I'd be interested in your thoughts on the various sites in the title.

I realize that small businesses vary in too many ways to count. Service business, retail, low dollar value items, high dollar value items. Small can mean service business income of $25,000 a year or gross sales in the millions; by the way, I don't buy the SBA definition of small business, which I think counts business with sales in excess of nine figures.

With those brief comments as preface, what are your experiences with the sites mentioned, or others, for that matter. Is it worth your time? Are you generating sales? What do friends and colleagues have to say about the business value of these sites.

I haven't updated my FB page in months - no interest in alerting my competition to where I'm active and who I'm doing business with - and haven't tweeted for even longer. I have a linked in premium account, but with everybody wanting to be part of everyone else's network, that seems pretty pointless from a marketing/sales perspective.

Your thoughts?

[mahina]

1. Facebook and twitter are useful to me

but I dont have time for linkedin.
I need to get instagram rolling.

A couple of times this holiday season fb friends shared our message to their networks.

[tosh]

2. LinkedIn

is useful to me in one way only: there are a couple of organizations that help independents in my sector to be competitive with the huge corporate chains that dominate. LinkedIn alerts me by email of news and discussions so I don't have to actively check those websites.

We have a Facebook page but we haven't had time to do much with it so it only serves to advertise location, hours & contact info so far. Biz is retail, though, so I'd like to make more use of the FB page.

[truedelphi]

3. Here is my reaction to FB, twitter etc.

For the most part, my thinking was that that I like Fb and twitter, but only for personal reasons.

However, in thinking over our small publishing company's situation, I created a second website which now serves as a splash page for the company, as well as a splash page for its main website.

Now once a week, I broadcast some news item about the company, and utilize FB and twitter for that purpose. Then I see to it that my spouse (who has far more friends on both services than I do) -- I encourage him to re-broadcast my Fb and twitter announcements.

He used to promote his website using Fb and twitter. But his broadcasts were a bit academic, and on the order of "Check out my exciting new dissertation on Subject X" rather than being visual and more simply informative.

It has been less than ten days of doing this, so we haven't seen results yet. But our fingers are crossed.