Online marketing for small business has conventionally revolved around driving visitors to your sites where the visitor will be turned into a sale by well-written sales pages.

That still applies in the present day, but besides all this, majority of the businesses are beginning to recognise the necessity to take into account the effect of social media.

It is not time to neglect all the search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies that brought you the traffic initially, as traffic is still king, but you must know what your customers are doing and where they are hanging out; the probability is that social media is playing an incredibly great part in their lives so social media marketing has to be playing an incredibly big role in your online marketing methods.

Small, local companies must be engaging with their clients on Facebook, Twitter and Google , as that’s where several people are now spending their time. There are over 10 million different visitors to Facebook each and every month in Australia and the launch of Google implies that the world of social media is going to be open to even more people who have so far shunned utilising Facebook. It is also becoming more related to search.

As an indication of the rise of social media, Google took merely around 2 weeks to reach 10 million accounts – Facebook took around two years to arrive at this number.

Along with social media marketing comes online reputation monitoring and management. Nowadays each and every person is a publisher of content – every time we type in a comment in our “status” on Facebook we are publishing content. That implies that it is noticeable to so many people and can have influence. Part of our online marketing strategy has to be creating a good influence in the direction of our business’s products and services.

If clients are spending time on social networking sites it stands to reason that they will be commenting on stuff they like and don’t like, right?

That implies that your products and services might be under examination and, in the sense that our reputation can be spoiled on account of bad reviews from consumers, misconceptions or situations where we did not respond to the expectations of the customers if we fail to keep track of this and sort out the process.

The old saying of “the client’s always right” applies online too and it is their belief of your business that counts, not yours!

That’s why you should be getting to know the online reputation monitoring equipment that allow you to check comments about your business or brand. These include Google Alerts, Social Mention, Viral Heat, Google Reader, Yahoo Alert, Twitter Search, Technorati, BackType and BoardReader.

Look forward to more names to be cropping up in the area – a definite sign of its significance and importance to your firm.

As you can see, the old rules still have their relevance with small business online marketing, but looking into the impact of social media is significant to the ongoing wellbeing of your business.

Join the new marketing revolution at Redcliffe Marketing and find out how to attract more local customers for your business. Get ideas on how to dramatically increase the effectiveness of even the smallest marketing budget. Visit http://www.RedcliffeMarketingLabs.com.au for more information.