Facebook, Twitter, blogs help keep you in the game

(The Record, April 4, 2010)

2010 is shaping up as the year small businesses are getting their feet wet in social media.

 

The attraction for company owners taking the first steps by creating pages or accounts on social Web sites Facebook and Twitter is it's cheap, quick and easy, and you control the content.

 

For the landscape designer, restaurant owner or party furniture rental company, those features are worth spending several minutes a day telling the virtual world about their latest job. And for public relations agencies, it's a growing business.

 

"When it first started, social media was never brought up" at client conferences, said Darren Magarro, president of the media agency The DSM Group Inc. in Franklin Lakes. "Now it's something leading the charge into a meeting."

 

For Borst Landscape and Design, LLC in Allendale, this year will be a test as to whether new Facebook page and Twitter accounts, both of which debuted in January, drive up hits on the Web site the firm redesigned in 2009.

 

Heidi Misovic, vice president of marketing, said she's been shooting video clips and photos of the company's waterfall and patio installations and landscape projects that she can easily post onto Facebook. She fills the Facebook page with fun content and includes links to the more serious Web site for services and design articles.

 

Misovic said she will still use print advertising and write articles for magazines but now includes Borst's Facebook and Twitter sites. The Twitter account is managed by Magarro's firm, she said.

 

"This [social media] ties everything together because I can still use the traditional methods," said Misovic, "and the Facebook/social media links traditional methods with technological methods, so it completes my circle of marketing."

 

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