Social media is communication 2.0. Leverage your consumer base so that customers become your personal sales team — nothing sells more or increases customer loyalty and engagement better than the voice of other customers. Social media takes word of mouth marketing  into the digital sphere as customers peruse the Internet for twitpics of the best pulled pork sandwich or the latest blog post about an Italian restaurant from a favourite foodie.

If you’re thinking of taking that dive into the social media deep end, here are some reasons you should incorporate social media into your small business strategy.

Customers can be your friends
For years consumers have been fighting a battle against advertisers – we were sick of being sold to from a faceless corporation and want to be treated like humans. Social media allows businesses to do that. Like the corner store your grandpa visited as a little boy or the butcher who knows you by first name, social media allows businesses to invoke a sense of community. Engage your customers in a conversation. Let them see the human side of the business. Leverage the community to gauge interest about new products, keep them up-to-date about events and let them know about specials before the regular public. Talk with, not at.

It’s cheap
Forget about buying that ad space in the newspaper or sending your intern out on the street with a sandwich board. Social media allows businesses to gain exposure for little or no money at all. Create a Facebook page, sign up for a Twitter account, establish a WordPress blog – all free. The only real investment is time. Interacting with your customers on these platforms can put them to work for you. They can spread the word about your great product or service by engaging their own social networks through yours. Ultimately, they help you expand your reach far beyond what you could have done with traditional advertising.

Responsiveness
Take off those rose-coloured glasses. Not everything that your customers say will be positive. It’s up to you as the business owner to respond to everything, even the bad stuff. Be ready to deal constructively with any negative exposure. The key to this is to be participating in and guiding a two-way conversation. Hootsuite is a great way to easily monitor several accounts, as well as understand perceptions and sentiments about your organization or service. Customers appreciate accessibility, transparency, and openness.

Stake out the competition
Staying competitive is the key to success in any industry. Social media can help you improve your knowledge base about your industry and interact with other movers and shakers in your industry. Network with those on the cutting edge and stay ahead of trends by tracking all the buzz within the industry. Stalk Twitter feeds, blogs and Facebook pages. Compile a list of important Twitter users and bloggers in your industry or come up with a list of keywords to track in Google alerts and bring the info to you.

Expound your unique product
While some of us may employ an army of clones, not everyone has the time  to  speak to each and every individual customer that walks in through the door. If you have a unique product that you are passionate about, social media allows you to extend your voice across time and space. Share pictures, videos or behind-the-scene looks that regular consumers would not be able to access anywhere else. Allow your social media platforms to be that unique place to share exclusive content and encourage others to share their own.

Twitter has become one of the most popular and most powerful social media platforms. When used successfully, Twitter can expand the reach of your brand and your organization. By leveraging the social networks of others, companies are taking advantage of Twitter’s marketing potential. Generating a large network of followers is the key to reaching your target audience, but it isn’t as simple as following others and crossing your fingers and hoping that they follow you back.

Here are some tips about ways to get more Twitter followers:

Link it
Generate consistency throughout all your social media channels by providing links to your Twitter profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, your blog and your email signature. People have to know you exist on Twitter before they can even start following you.

Hash it
#Hashtagging keywords ensures other users who are searching up those terms can easily find you. Check out search.twitter.com for trending topics and jump into the conversation. If you attend conferences and events, find out in advance what the hashtag is — this is a great way to network with fellow attendees.

We <3 pix
People are very visual consumers and pictures are heavily retweeted and spread around. If you love eating out, other foodies love to see pictures of what you’re eating, for example. As with links, ow.ly provides a great way to track how many people viewed your photo and how often it was passed along.

Monkey see, monkey do
Follow the top Twitter users in your area and watch what and how they tweet. Pay close attention, not only to the content they send out, but also to the tone of their messages.

Know your niche
Knowing how and where you fit into specific interest groups ensures your tweets are reaching the most relevant target audience. Have a targeted audience in mind and tailor your messages towards its interests and ideas. The ultimate goal is to be an expert in your niche so that you become the go-to person.

Retweeting
Encourage existing followers to retweet your links. It expands your reach beyond your own social network, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Using a URL shortener, like ow.ly, provides a good way to track your success.

Tweet during peak hours
Just because you’re nocturnal doesn’t mean the rest of your Twitter followers are. Send tweets during peak hours to give you the best opportunity to be seen and read. While there haven’t been any studies yet, your best bet for peak traffic is around the time people are getting to work, taking breaks and getting off work — 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. If these hours don’t work for you, Hootsuite allows you to set scheduled tweets so you can share the latest Lonely Island video while you’re catching up on your life.

Ask, ask, and ask some more
Ask questions. Get people engaged in a conversation to encourage two-way communication. Be in the know  about hot news items and top headlines and poll your followers. Ask who is going to win American Idol? or what do you think about those sweater vests Harper wears. Would you vote for Donald Trump if he ran for president? Questions can generate hundreds of responses and each response is seen by anyone who follows the responder, thus expanding your reach.

No one likes a try-hard
Stop thinking of Twitter as purely a marketing tool. The idea of social media is just that — social. It’s about two-way communication. People like to know that there’s a human behind a computer screen and they don’t want to be sold to all the time. Have fun and engage in conversations and discussions. Your customers will join you because they want to connect to a person, not a brand.

Free stuff is great
Try putting together a contest or a giveaway. People love free stuff. Encourage people to follow and RT in order to be entered to win. Make sure you have a killer prize that your followers would be interested in winning (and not that sweater your grandma gave you for your birthday). While this strategy is short-term in scope, incorporating a few of the other tips we’ve listed above will ensure that your followers stay beyond the life of the contest.

Mo’ money, mo’ followers?
If you’re lazy, just buy them. But we don’t recommend it. Having an active, engaged community is more valuable than having a big list of followers that don’t care about you or your organization.

It’s amazing to see the number of followers grow year after year and to see  the consistency of @Mashable and @TechCrunch. HootSuite being named one of the event’s champion of champions is a huge honour. We thank our hard working team and our fans. The users have a major impact  - @HootSuite couldn’t have done it without them.

Read more here and see why Chris Brogan was named most influential, even though he didn’t attend this year.

* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity

Invoke’s highly successful EATS software launches it’s largest
client yet this week.? Fort Worth Texas based Super Suppers has over
150 locations and is close to being the largest meal preparation
franchise in the world.? Judie Byrd founded The Culinary School of
Fort Worth where people can earn chef’s certificates after their day
jobs.? Now Judie and her team write, test, and implement the recipes
that makes Super Suppers so successful.

This week our team has worked very hard to help the stores achieve a
seamless migration to their new home with EATS and we can’t be more
proud of the effort and success of the launch.

With the new EATS system, Super Suppers has increased their ability to
analyze sales and buying patterns through EATS reporting systems, and
also move towards a quicker checkout process with a full-featured Web
based POS.

1. Open sidebar.php and remove (or comment out) wp_list_pages(); line

2. Open your header.php and put this code wherever you want the menus to start

<div id=”toolbar”>

<?php wp_list_pages(); ?>

</div>

3. In your header.php paste the following.

<script language=”javascript”>

sfHover = function() {

var sfEls = document.getElementById(“nav”).getElementsByTagName(“LI”);

for (var i=0; i<sfEls.length; i++) {

sfEls[i].onmouseover=function() {

this.className+=” sfhover”;

}

sfEls[i].onmouseout=function() {

this.className=this.className.replace(new RegExp(” sfhover\b”), “”);

}

}

}

if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent(“onload”, sfHover);

</script>

4. style.css

We wanted to go horizontal so we used the following in our style.css file.

/*menu */

#nav {

margin-left: 295px;

list-style: none;

background: #900;

padding: 0;

border: 1px solid #fff;

border-width: 0px 0px 0px 1px;

}

#nav ul {

margin: 0;

padding: 0;

height: 1em;

}

#toolbar form {

margin: 0;

padding: 0.1em 2em 0.1em 0em;

height: 1em;

}

#toolbar input {

margin: 1px;

}

#nav a {

display: block;

color: #fff;

text-decoration: none;

padding: 0.1em 2em;

}

#nav li {

float: left;

padding: 0;

background: #900;

border: 1px solid #fff;

border-width: 1px 0;

}

#nav li ul {

position: absolute;

left: -999em;

height: auto;

width: 14.4em;

w\idth: 12.9em;

font-weight: normal;

border: 1px solid #fff;

margin: 0;

list-style: none;

}

#nav li li {

padding-right: 1em;

width: 13.4em;

border: 0px;

}

#nav li ul a {

width: 12em;

w\idth: 9em;

}

#nav li ul ul {

margin: -1.75em 0 0 14em;

}

#nav li:hover ul ul, #nav li:hover ul ul ul, #nav li.sfhover ul ul, #nav li.sfhover ul ul ul {

left: -999em;

}

#nav li:hover ul, #nav li li:hover ul, #nav li li li:hover ul, #nav li.sfhover ul, #nav li li.sfhover ul, #nav li li li.sfhover ul {

left: auto;

}

#nav li:hover, #nav li.sfhover {

background: #F20000;

}

/* end menu */

5. You should be good to go. Best of luck!

6. Edit wp-includes/template-functions-post.php
around line 326 comment out or replace
$output .= ‘<li class=”pagenav”>’ . $r['title_li'] . ‘<ul>’;
with
$output .= ‘<ul id=”nav”>’;

Thanks to htmldog for Son of Suckerfish tutorial.