Many small businesses have an intensely local customer base. The Internet is often seen as a great tool for global sales, and it’s easy to forget that it can be used on a neighbourhood scale too.

Take, for example, the cinemas who engage with their customers on Twitter, announcing forthcoming movies and warning regulars when booking may be necessary. Then there are the cafes, reminding customers of their presence by announcing the day’s specials on Facebook… just around lunchtime, when stomachs are rumbling. Councils announce new policies; pubs put out their list of upcoming gigs; bus companies warn of delays or changed routes. The list is endless, and for many of us grateful subscribers to local twitterstreams and Facebook feeds, the benefits have made a small but palpable improvement to daily life.

Facebook recognises this local trend even if we users are less aware of it. It now allows you to advertise within a very tight regional area. So, for example, if you are located in Nottingham, you can choose for your ads to only appear to that city’s residents. Got a branch in Sheffield too? No problem – you can pick and add as many cities as you wish. What’s more, you can choose to advertise within a 10, 25, or 50 mile radius, thus reaching as many outliers as is practical for your own individual business.

Check which cities are available on the Create a Facebook Ad page: it may be time to seriously consider investment in this area of marketing now, even if it never seemed worthwhile before.

Yahoo pitches in this week and signals the importance that it gives to social media, with the announcement that it will be integrating with Twitter as well as with Facebook. Effectively, this means that users’ Twitterstreams will be accessible from all Yahoo’s products, from its Search page to its acquisitions such as Flickr (seasoned Flickr users will already know that they can tweet or blog their photos right from the Flickr page).

Integration is also set to go further in the near future: comment on an article within the Yahoo sphere, rate something or contribute to Yahoo! Answers – and you’ll have the option to update all your friends via Twitter and Facebook as you do so. Like Google, Yahoo are trying to synthesise your online experiences into one place – and, of course, like Google, they want that place to be their own domain.

As a user, the question is, perhaps, at what point does all this synthesis result in a big fat Too Much Information? But meanwhile, as a small business owner, you need to be sitting up and wondering whether it’s going to benefit you if customer interactions and reviews are appearing in ever more places across the internet – and what you can do to ensure that those messages are positive ones.

Do you ever wonder how much good your social media marketing activity is doing you?

A recent study by Rice University in Texas attempted to quantify the exact ROI of a Facebook page for a small business – in this case, a bakery and cafe chain in Houston. Having no previous social media presence, they were an ideal subject, since they were able to precisely measure the difference to a number of metrics.

These included new customers, customer loyalty increases, number of visits per customer, and amount spent – all compared with a ‘normal’ customer who had not signed up to the Facebook page. The result was that a Facebook presence had a positive effect on all of these aspects – but note that the bakery was diligent about frequent updates, with special offers and photo galleries.

The message is clear – it could also work for your small business, if you are willing to put the time in – or outsource to people like us.

So, last week tweets from space – this week, tweets from dogs. Is the world going completely crazy?

Mattel, the well-known toy company, have brought out Puppy Tweets. It’s basically a collar which is triggered by certain doggy events – barking, say, or chowing down – to send an automatic message to the dog’s Twitter account.

Which does rather beg the question, who (beyond its adoring owner, I suppose) is going to want to read those tweets? As some wag remarked as Twitter announced that 50 million tweets are sent per day, yes, and at least 1 million of them are actually read.

As you may have heard, there’s a new social media platform in town – and it comes from Google. As a business owner, you may be wondering whether it’s yet another place where you have to keep up a presence – like Facebook, Twitter and your blog aren’t taking enough of your time!

Our advice? Wait a little. There’s already been quite a strong backlash in the press (and, ironically enough, on those existing social media platforms), mostly predicated on the way Google introduced its new product. As it’s integrated with GMail (Google’s email service) and switched on by default, many are complaining that it breaches privacy by scanning your contacts and setting them up as your followers with no input required.

If negative feeling reaches critical mass, we may see the service fade away into the background, at least for a while. Remember all the excitement about Google Wave? That receded, once people had gained an invitation, logged in, and found it… well, a little more visionary than they could cope with, shall we say. How about Lively, Google’s virtual world? I’d forgotten that so thoroughly that I just had to Google it to remember its name, and yet, at the time of launch, it was going to be the next great thing.

So don’t launch your Buzz presence yet – if you’ve even worked out how to yet, which would put you a step ahead of the big boys. If you feel brave, click that ‘Buzz’ link in your GMail, and watch, and wait. Then you’ll understand the interface and be ready to leap in when it starts looking like a viable way to promote your business.

Back in September we wrote about the surge in usage of the mobile web. This month, a startling survey from GSMA reveals that 25% of the UK population went online via mobile during last December.

Astonishingly, almost half the time online was spent at one site: Facebook (the next popular domain, Google, is not as much of a surprise). It seems that those with a real Facebook habit cannot bear to put down its networking and socialising capabilities, even while they are out and about.

For you, the business owner, this points to one thing: you need to keep your Facebook presence fresh, current and useful. After all, you know what they say in online marketing: don’t wait for the customers to come to you. These days, you have to go to where they already are – and that, it seems, overwhelmingly, is Facebook.

Regular users of Twitter will already be familiar with the “trending topics” function, which shows which words and phrases are being most tweeted about at any given time.

From today, Twitter have rolled out the option to view more ‘local’ trending topics, with the thinking that these will be more relevant and interesting for the user.

For those who rather like the global nature of Twitter, the choice still remains to see a worldwide picture – and, at the moment, ‘local’ only means ‘UK’.

It will be interesting to see whether this feature drills down to a city level in the near future (as it already does for key cities in the US), and, if so, what that will mean for local businesses. You may find that small campaigns and pieces of news really start to make waves in your own local community – and that has to be for the good.

For someone at the forefront of technology, it might seem like a bit of a late move, but Bill Gates has joined Twitter (you can see his Twitterstream here).

Mind you, one can understand his reluctance: the social media platform creates a notoriously direct channel between users. When one of those users is a celebrity, then clearly that can create some difficult circumstances.

It’s this same directness that Gates is obviously hoping to tap into for good. He’s using the channel to promote new blog posts and initiatives from his charity foundation – in just the same way that any other charity or small business might.

Unlike the man in the street, though, he is going to be heavily scrutinised. Time will tell whether the undoubted benefits of Twitter as a medium will outweigh the fuss around his every tweet.

As snow falls on much of the UK today – and with more predicted overnight – there are some fascinating uses of social media emerging. Those who say that Twitter is a waste of time should check out Ben Marsh’s snow map. Marsh has aggregated all tweets containing the hashtag ‘uksnow’, and their postcode, to make a real-time representation of where it is snowing, and how deeply.

Meanwhile, in Brighton, innovative residents have taken council information on where to find grit bins, and placed them on a Google map: a kind of self-organised crowdsourcing which has improved on the resources available (possibly to the council’s embarrassment?).

A multitude of uses are being found for social media every day, and they are not all just airy-fairy projects. Some of them actually make life easier. While the two projects I’ve mentioned are altruistic ones with no profit involved, they do show the power of the crowd – and that, of course, can be harnessed for business purposes too. It’s just a matter of having a bright idea.

The big news this week is ‘real time search’ from Google, which, in a nutshell, means the inclusion of the very latest news stories, blog posts, tweets and other social media activity in their main search results.

Now, more than ever, every business needs to consider its social media activity when building an online marketing or SEO strategy. Where the two strands may have been quite distinct, the lines are now blurring.