Here are some tips on how you can make social media marketing easier for small businesses:

1. You don’t have to jump immediately into hiring a social media expert. You can try reading about it yourself. Allot an hour or so a day to read and absorb the basics of social media, then practice it bit by bit. Remember that you don’t have to go full out immediately. And also, the more you understand what goes on in social media, the lesser the likelihood of you getting fooled by so-called social media “experts”.

2. You don’t have to spend on high-tech gadgets. Your tried-and-tested video camera, even your cellphone camera, can be a very useful tool in making promotional or instructional videos which you can post on social video sharing sites like YouTube.

3. To help you maximize your allotted time for social media marketing, don’t spread yourself too thin. Instead of being everywhere at once, why not choose a select few that you can concentrate on. Make sure that those sites you’ve chosen are ones that actually matter.

4. If you’re worried about tracking ROIs for your social media effort, you can simply ask new customers where they’ve heard about your business. It’s quick, it’s personal, and it gives you the chance to get to talk to your clients a little more.

5. To make it easier for you to stick to your allotted time, it helps to set up an alarm clock for when you need to start working and when your time is up for doing your social media marketing.

hi

A functional mobile app is very useful indeed. Shareware apps that you can download to Blackberry or iPhone are put there to generate data and small amounts of ad revenue - so on that basis they are quite valuable if marketing towards a consumer group.

For businesses, this is idea of a functional app is more important. For example, we develop CRM solutions for mobiles - iPhones, Blackberrys, HTC, etc whereby direct marketing can be tracked just as successfully as in-house workflow.

But when we think of marketing in the context of mobile phones we're really thinking about advertising and mobile search campaigns which are useless without the right product and again, only functional searches suit business.

Thanks