Adidas are. Virgin are. Proctor and Gamble and Toys R Us are… are you? Using Facebook for advertising, that is.

A recent Business Week article reveals that advertising on this social network has quadrupled since 2009. Clearly that oft-repeated mantra, ‘go to where your customers are’ is having some effect in the marketing offices of these major companies. And with Facebook currently beating even Google as the site we spend the most time on, that’s where you can be sure to find them.

All indications are that the Facebook userbase is expanding. Need proof that even the silver surfers are embracing this 21st century phenomenon with the best of them? Well, you might just find it in the fact that a certain 64 year old is now getting to grips with wall posts and silly trivia quizzes. And even the recent Quit Facebook Day seems to have dented the ever-expanding userbase by very little indeed.

We’ve posted before about the ability to reach localised or highly specialised audiences through Facebook’s advertising network. While the big companies we mention above no doubt enjoy a massive budget and blanket coverage, you can do just as much with far less money. Like us to show you how? We’d be delighted.

Google makes over 400 small changes to its search algorithm per year, on average, so why is the Search community all abuzz with the recent Mayday update? Simply, it seems, because many of them have seen their rankings suffer, especially when it comes to the ‘long-tail’ results we were talking about only last week.

As ever, Google is striving to make a better user experience: it seems that the losses will largely be felt by gargantuan e-commerce sites with thousands of automatically-generated pages and little content. Ultimately, that’s got to be good for the consumer – and good for you, the small business.

Matt Cutts, increasingly the voice of Google, especially when it comes to addressing concerned webmasters, toes the party line (as you can see in the video below): concentrate not on your rankings, but on being the authority for that product (or service, or topic). Add great content, that’s all you have to do. Admittedly, for a party line, it’s a pretty good one.

Vanessa Fox on Search Engine Land has some practical tips for those wishing to find out if the Mayday update has affected their sites for the better or worse – and what to do about it if it’s the latter.

It’s quite labour-intensive though, so if this is new ground for you, or you simply don’t have the time, we would be very happy to take it on for you. Just drop us a line.

Now here’s that video.

The whole point of the Internet, some might say, is that you can reach the whole world – so small businesses, serving a small local area, might be excused for thinking they don’t need a website at all. Well, you’ve only got to search this very blog for the word ‘local’ to see that we think otherwise.

We’ve looked at local trends on Twitter, local ads on Facebook, and Google’s ‘in stock nearby’ feature, just to name a few. Read through those posts, and the conclusion can only be that all sorts of websites are leveraging the internet very successfully to speak to customers who may only be a few miles – or even metres – from their premises.

Being a small business ourselves, we are quite passionate about what a local approach can do for one’s own community. We always try to shop local ourselves, mindful that money we put into our own neighbourhood will, most likely, enrich our own customers, and, in turn, increase our trade. That may sound like a selfish kind of altruism, but we prefer to think of it as good karma!

It was the same approach that led us to offer free websites for local companies: we like to see our neighbourhood’s start-ups succeeding, and are happy to do what we can to help. After all, today’s small businesses can easily become tomorrow’s thriving enterprises, bringing higher rates of employment and enrichment to the community. Just don’t forget us when you’re at the top!

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.

Yesterday, we asked the question Can small businesses compete with the big boys?. All this week, we’ll be looking at the subject in more depth.

A few years ago, a concept that has become known as the long tail gained currency, and was recognised as a viable way for niche businesses to make money online.

In a nutshell, the theory suggests that while big companies have the money to bid on major keywords such as ‘holidays’ and ‘car insurance’, there is just as much to be gained by the aggregate effects of optimising for many hundreds of less searched-for terms.

In other words, you may never afford top position for ‘holidays’ but you might find that you can perform well on searches such as ‘child-friendly lettings in Dorset’. And while the latter search might only bring you, say, three or four searches a month, put a whole lot of them together, and suddenly you are getting respectable traffic.

Unfortunately, as time has passed, the big businesses have cottoned on to the benefits of the long tail, too. The prime example is Amazon – utterly optimised for any search for any book title, and the other goods it now carries, too. Not only is their entire site structured to build SEO into every element; but also, they can afford the staff and the development to ensure that every new page is optimised to the hilt.

For a small businessperson, the website is almost always one of many responsibilities that come with managing a business. They certainly don’t have the time to monitor search engine positioning and add every long tail term they can think of to their site. The only way to capitalise on the long tail phenomenon is to outsource SEO, and it does make sense to do so (that’s something we can do; just drop us a line if you’re interested).

Success with the long tail will very much depend on your business, and who your current online competitors are. But it’s definitely worth looking in to – or asking us to do that for you.

It’s often said that the Internet is a level playing-field, where small businesses have every opportunity to compete with gargantuan multi-nationals.

Is that still the case? These days, almost all large companies understand the vital importance of a good web presence and search engine rankings – even it has taken some of the more traditional establishments a long time to come round.

Many will now employ dedicated SEO specialists to ensure that they are top of the page for the major search terms. They may also have in-house development teams, allowing them to take advantage of every latest technology – or even lead the way in forging their own new functionality.

The landscape today is very different from the early history of the Internet, when a little bit of online nous went a long way. This has left many small businesses, previously maintaining excellent rankings, floudering in the wake of the big boys. With a small workforce and limited time, how can they compete?

This week, we’ll be looking at how small businesses can vie with the online giants. You may not beat them, but you can stay afloat, with a little know-how, so keep reading for our best insights into surival for the small online business.

According to recent news reports, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, will occasionally reply to emails from any old man in the street (or rather, at a keyboard). You have to admire that degree of accessibility from the top level of a company. It reminds me of when I’ve experienced quite the opposite.

Now, Apple may not be immediately comparable with a small holiday rental place in Weston Super Mare, but the truth of the matter is, when you make online contact, you do expect a reply. That holds true for a global corporation as much as it does for a small business.

Having identified a slick, attractive website promising everything we desired for our week by the beach, I submitted my enquiry. And then I waited, and I waited, and I waited. Eventually, I picked up the phone, spoke to someone immediately, and made my booking.

They were lucky I did – if I hadn’t liked the look of their place quite so much, I might have tried a few competitor websites and the first one to reply would have got my trade.

Fast forward to the day we turn up at the lodging, to be met by the friendly owner, who wants to know how we found out about her place. I tell her how impressed I was with the website, but that I was disappointed not to receive a reply to my online enquiry.

Oh yes, she beamed, my friend set up that website for me, including the enquiry form. I don’t know the first thing about the internet! Enquiries go into my email but I don’t know how to access them.

Let’s hope that she has plenty of word-of-mouth and brochure trade, because that website, no matter how impressive, is not doing its work, due to one fundamental (if quite incredible) oversight.

The moral of my story is, first, imitate Steve Jobs and make it easy for your customers to contact you… and second, make sure you prioritise replying to those customers.

Steve Jobs might be lauded for his willingness to engage like this – for you, it should be the first principle of running a website.

‘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.

Here’s a fact that never ceases to be amazing, published this week by the Guardian:

All human language used since the dawn of time would take up about 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form, which is less than 1% of the digital content created since someone first switched on a computer.

While we’re still getting used to the term ‘petabyte’, a new word has been coined to cater for the vast quantities of data that are being stored online daily – the zettabyte. And even that’s not expected to be adequate for long.

Those of us who already find the Internet a vast, unnavigable place may emit a sigh at this point. For you, as a small business owner, there are three golden rules in the face of all this data:

1. Make your website findable. At this moment in history, that means optimising for search engines. As the web proliferates, more and more it will be true that those who are not on the first page of search engine results will simply not be found.

2. Make it worthwhile. With so much content online, users will not give the time of day to anything that fails to live up to the highest standards. Well, when there are so many alternatives, why would they?

3. Make it memorable. From your URL to your content, ensure that you provide content that will stick in the mind, because it will be the memorable sites that get customers returning time and again.

It’s not so hard, but these three rules will make all the difference in the age of the zettabyte. And we can help you with all of them: just drop us a line or give us a call.