Which social networks should you use to promote your business?

I have attended a few business networking events recently and have been really quite surprised at how many, particularly smaller and startup, businesses see little value in utilising the power of social networks to promote their business.

One particular example was during a conversation with a person who runs a bed and breakfast in her home town – and she didn't really see the point of Twitter and other online things as, she said, they use up her valuable time and have little impact on her business.

After pondering this for a while I went back to the lady in question and learned a little more about her business – then used the internet to perform a few searches and sure enough other local bed and breakfasts were appearing in Google Search, and in forums. One in particular had a number of favourable comments on Twitter. I asked her the question, "If someone searches the internet looking for a short break would you rather your competitor get the call?" She promised she would think about it.

When using the internet to promote your business it is worth having a clear objective, a plan and understanding of what benefits you can get from each service. With this in mind let's take a quick look at each of the major providers and see what we come up with in the context of a local bed and breakfast.

The first thing to mention is that it pays to be consistent. Be consistent with your brand identity so that visitors can quickly realise they are on one of your sites. Also, ensure you always direct visitors back to your home web site – and make sure your contact information is up to date.

Blog: Create a blog to support your web site - it is really simple to do these days (For example, take a look at Wordpress.com and Blogger.com). Once you have a blog then make it your central dynamic hub, and use it to talk about your area of interest. Write regular articles about what is going on, and where, and if there is a specific event then make sure you give plenty of notice and write about it once it has happened. Ask people in your industry to write guest articles and offer to write guest articles for others.

Twitter: Twitter provides a mechanism for fast sharing of concepts, ideas, and trivia. By utilising Twitter and talking about the things that are important to you, such as events in your local area, local historic information, meet-ups, places to eat and visit, you can quickly build up a reputation as being someone who knows a thing or two – you may even learn something, too. Also, subscribe to similar services such as FriendFeed and Plurk to widen your audience.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a great place to connect with like-minded business people. While you can connect with peers in your own industry it often pays to think laterally as you can often get good referrals from people this way. For example, hook up with your service providers, food supplier, local photographers, writers, media and historians.

Facebook: Harness the power of crowd sourcing with Facebook. Create a page about your business and encourage others to leave their comments, photos, and stories about their experience. A word of mouth recommendation goes a long way and people do like to recommend things to friends.

Flickr:  Upload suitable images to Flickr and share them with others and encourage them to share them too – if a picture is worth a thousand words then use it to your advantage. Quirky, unusual, and refreshingly different images always catch the eye and online content providers are often looking for something to complement articles they write.

YouTube: Support your blog with video articles (copyright permitting!) and build a YouTube Channel where people can view all your video content, comment, and share it with others. Encourage willing customers to post video diaries of their experiences and share them in your channel. You don't have to worry about making mistakes or the video looking too unprofessional - a lot of the time that is what makes a video interesting.

Upcoming: When it comes to local events, sign up to a service such as Upcoming at Yahoo and create a profile then keep it updated with details of all the events relevant to your interest and business. Ensure you keep it updated if events change – this helps offer reassurance that you are a reliable source of information.