Yesterday and on Monday we asked the question: Can small businesses compete with the big boys?

As we have already seen in the previous two posts, the big corporations have certainly cottoned on to the importance of online sales, and have the resources to corner the market when it comes to PPC, SEO, and, increasingly, social media. While there used to be areas in which a nifty small business could nip in and make quick wins, the landscape is now very different.

One area in which the small business still has dominance, though, is the local search. Many small businesses by their very nature can only service a narrow geographical area, and this limitation can become a benefit.

You might choose to optimise, for example, for the specific area of your town in which you operate. It is unlikely that the national and multi-national companies will have drilled down to that level, but you will scoop up all the searches of anyone looking for your type of business in your specific area.

Don’t forget Google’s increasing moves towards local search tied in with the user’s geographic location, too. We’ve discussed before how having an updated profile on Google Maps can pay big dividends, especially when it comes to users who are within a couple of miles of your business. Include photos, videos, and even special offers coupons, all at no cost to yourself, and see your local profile improve.

Then there’s the tailored, local use of social media. Increasingly, businesses are discovering locality-based cliques on Twitter which are easy to break into. No full-on marketing strategy is required: it’s enough simply to be available and communicative, and you’ll find your business becoming entrenched in users’ everyday perceptions of your town.

These are just a few ideas of how to think local, and beat the big boys at their own game. We’d be happy to tailor strategies for your own specific small business: just drop us a line or give us a call.

‘Keep a vibrant social media profile’ is now common advice to small businesses, and we at Notting Hill Internet Services repeat it as often as everyone else. But when you find that you’re spending half the day posting on Facebook, updating Twitter, putting photos on Flickr and composing your latest blog post, you may well feel that it isn’t leaving you very much time to actually, well, run your business.

Now, it seems, Microsoft have seen and understood the problem, and brought out a product to solve it. Not immediately available to the wider population, Spindex has initially been trialled at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco: no doubt they’re hoping that where geeks tread first, others will follow.

The basic idea, as far as we can assess it at this stage, is that you will be able to update all your online profiles from a single interface – and see what others are saying, too. For us, the question has to be whether this will become an invaluable tool, and we’ll all wonder how we did without it… or will it be just one more piece of technology to get our heads round?

If social media or any other aspect of your online presence is taking up too much of your time, in any case, you may not wish to wait for Spindex’s wider launch. Just give us a call and we’ll be happy to take some or all of the burden off your shoulders. After all, we muck about on social media all day long: the only difference is, we can legitimately say it is our business!

The well-regarded social media guide Mashable reports that Twitter has come up with an intriguing business idea – and one that could benefit businesses if they play it right.

The promoted tweet is an interesting concept which goes where no advertising system has gone before. Promoted tweets will appear (at first, anyway) in search results: imagine, for example, the benefit of being able to attach your name to any search for the name of your town, or a special offer to any search for your brand.

But it’s not just a matter of buying your space on the Twitterstream. Adverts will be rewarded for the level of engagement they provoke. Just as a standard tweet will be quickly forgotten if it isn’t retweeted or replied to, a non-compelling advert will sink, unnoticed.

Clearly this is Twitter’s way of trying to ensure that adverts give something back to the user, potentially minimising the predicted outcry from those who are used to tweeting cost-free.

Entrepreneurial businesses are already setting up auto-replies to any tweet containing a phrase they perceive to display an interest in their product, but the method is very hit-and-miss and runs the risk of irritating a user. This is a smart move by Twitter to try and reap some benefits from the opportunities that these chancers have already identified.

The best websites are those which appear simple – the most-often cited example being, of course, the Google website, with its plain search box. Of course, like the duck (serene on top; legs paddling frantically below the water), even the barest sites can have a lot of code beneath the surface.

Here’s proof. Twitter, often praised for the way that with its 140 character limit it forces users to be succinct, might be thought of as one of the simplest sites of all. This week, the BBC reproduced the image above, showing the huge amount of code required by a single tweet. Pretty, isn’t it?

The news is full of comment on Facebook’s latest innovation. That familiar ‘like’ button has escaped the bounds of Facebook itself, and can now be found across the web on all sorts of other sites, from news providers to film directories to – of course – consumer product sites.

See this My Deco page for an example of how it could work (via Channel 4).

Most of the stories are concerned about inadvertent privacy lapses that this could bring about. Do you want the whole world to know about your choice of underwear, or your preferred pudding? If not, as a consumer, the choice is simple – just don’t press that ‘like’ button, however used you may be to doing so within the Facebook environment.

As a retailer, though, you may be wondering whether to integrate this feature. We’d say it seems to be a feature with a lot of benefits for business – it’s free word-of-mouth advertising, or “increased eyeballs” as the phrase has it. However, if you’re a cautious type, you may wish to wait until the hype has died down a bit, and then reassess.

(If you’re not so cautious, and you want in on this feature NOW, give us a call!)

We’ve proclaimed the benefits of social media many times: we’ve also warned small business owners to update their status with some degree of caution. With online services that you use in your own private life, it’s all too easy to lapse into an unprofessional tone on the business profile. Before you know it, you can besmirch your company’s good name, just like Habitat and Nestle, to name two recent cases.

That said, up until now, there has always been the safety net of time. As the weeks pass, your tweets and your Facebook updates disappear from the page, replaced by more recent messages. In the fast-moving online world, mistakes can be forgotten.

Or so we thought. This week, the library of Congress in the US has announced that it will be archiving every single public tweet, considering them to be a valuable historic record of public opinion. At the same time, Google unveiled its ‘live search’ timeline, which at the moment allows you to go back to February of this year – and soon will go back to the very day Twitter launched (21st March 2006, as it happens) – and search all public tweets.

Now that your tweets are saved for posterity, it makes sound sense to give thought to what you type, both on your business AND personal accounts. However, if you’re looking for consolation, it might be found in the fact that Twitter this month signed up its 100 millionth user. Finding your minor indiscretion in a sea of tweets that size… well, let’s just say it might be easier to find a needle in a haystack.

Is your customer base made up of more women than men? Many are: there are the obvious examples such as women’s clothes shops, beauticians and spas – and there are also those areas where, for some reason, women seem to do the final decision-making, like house-buying, grocery shopping, and kitchen fitting. Well, you will know your own customers best – have you noticed that they are predominantly female?

If so, you might be interested in research from the University of California which has found that women, more than men, value their online communities. Women, apparently, are more prone to forge relationships online, leading to lasting, valued friendships.

What does that mean for you? Well, a canny business owner who wants to target women would do well to remember that Facebook advertising allows you to segment by a number of factors, including gender. In other words, you can deliver your advertisements directly to the people most likely to need your services. And because women are online more, they are ripe for marketing.

If you don’t fancy paying for your advertising, don’t forget the massive value on setting up a Facebook page, which is free to do. By providing a space for customers to chat, comment, and even socialise, you might just find you’re tapping in to the ‘female effect’ anyway.

As a small business owner, it makes sense to outsource certain work. If you need a new shop frontage, you call a sign-maker; if your electrics are on the blink, you find an electrician. The chances are that you also paid out for a website.

If your website provider was like most, this was a one-off transaction. You paid a set amount; they built your site and that was the end of it. For many businesses, this seems fine. You have an online presence; customers can find your contact details and that is enough.

Stop to consider for a while, though, and it doesn’t take much to realise that your website could be doing so much more for you. With a little expertise, you could be optimising it for the search engines, ensuring that it comes out near the top in the searches most likely to bring you solid customers.

You could be finding new customers and engaging with existing ones on social media like Facebook and Twitter. And, if your business merits it, you could be updating your website regularly to keep customers returning for special promotions, or goods tied in to festive occasions.

These things all take time and expertise – and that’s why many small businesses will simply put up with a small, static website that does nothing more than sit there. The good news is, it’s relatively easy to get ahead of your competitors, even if you don’t have that time or the required knowledge. The trick is to outsource.

Take a look at our managed internet services for small businesses page and you will see that an active internet profile can be yours at a very reasonable price. We believe it will pay for itself.

We’ve been pushing the benefits of social media marketing for small businesses for some time now – a flip through our recent blog posts will show that. Most mainstream media is pretty much in accord with us, but I guess that with every new fad there will be some naysayers. Up until now, those have been limited, in my experience, to the older generation of my family, or the odd ranting conversation at a party, but now the Huffington Post – a pretty mainstream internet news source – has published a piece questioning whether Twitter is just too much trouble for the small business.

I understand writer Nelson Davis’ point – that for the very small company, there just isn’t enough time in the day to keep up with the interaction that can take off on Twitter. He also quotes some doomy figures about the downturn of usage on the site. But for every negative he quotes, I could name a small local business that is getting palpable benefits from their tweets. There is also a small part of me who wonders whether this sort of piece is too easy to write: swim against the tide, and you’ll always get plenty of interest.

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.