The recession has been hard on everyone in the country, but 2009 was an especially tough year for small business owners. Sadly, it won’t be getting much better soon. This week, the National Federation of Independent Business reported that the Small Business Optimism Index decreased another 0.3 points to 88.0 from November to December, an indicator of a lengthy struggle ahead.

Small business owners shouldn’t close up their doors just yet, however, as there are a number of things that they can do to help create new business and expand their marketing efforts at very low costs. I’m talking, of course, about social media. Although they can be tricky to learn, social media tools provide the best opportunity for small business owners to grow their brand organically without hemorraghing the money they need to keep their bills paid. Social media tools are also an important of managing and promoting one’s personal reputation online.

What we hope to do with today’s blog post is help small business owners kill two birds with one stone: Make your personal branding efforts work for your small business branding efforts and vice versa. Now, let’s get started.

–

How to Use Your Username

In order to use the vast majority of social media sites, you must assign yourself a user name. Typically, this username also gets carried into your public profile URL. For instance, the official Reputation.com twitter account can be found at http://twitter.com/RepDef. In this case, “repdef” is our Twitter username. What is unique about Twitter, however, is that your username and your real name are shared simultaneously.

If you look again at the Reputation.com Twitter account, you will see that, while our username is “repdef,” at the top of the browser window you will see Reputation.com (repdef). If you sign up for Twitter, you can use this unique functionality to promote your business while also promoting your own good name. In other words, if you are Bill Johnson, the owner of Johnson Tax Prep Services, you could set your Twitter username to JohnsonTaxPrep and also use your real name.

Besides Twitter, you can also play with your username and public URL on other social networking websites, such as LinkedIn. As I showed in our recent guide to making LinkedIn an effective online reputation management tool, LinkedIn users have the ability to set their public URL to anything they want. If we use the Bill Johnson example again, the LinkedIn URL would be http://linkedin.com/in/JohnsonTaxPrepServices while the actual content of the LinkedIn profile would be about Bill Johnson himself.

Be a Better Business Blogger

Does your small business have a website? If it doesn’t, stop reading this post and find yourself a good designer to help you make one. Seriously, it’s that important. If you do have a website for your small business, though, does it have a blog? As we’ve explored previously here on the Reputation.com Blog, setting up a blog for your business is a great way of opening up a dialogue with your customers and getting feedback on how to improve your products or services.

A good example to check out is our very own Reputation.com Blog. The reason we set up the RD Blog was to provide a way for our customers to learn more about online reputation management and Internet privacy issues. If a customer connects with a blog post, he or she may want to learn more about our services, which is why there are a number of navigational links at the top of the page for the Reputation.com homepage as well as other parts of our website. It is important to note, however, that utilizing your company’s blog to bring in customers requires little cost, but lots of effort. Blogs don’t become popular overnight, and it may take time for you to find the right voice for your business.

An added bonus of setting up a business blog is that, if it’s used correctly, it can boost your personal brand too. As you can see if you look at the title of this post, I use my full name when I publish something to the Reputation.com Blog. By using my full name rather than something generic such as “Admin,” I can build up a strong collection of content that Google and other search engines will associate with my name when people search for me. In fact, if you search my name, one of the top links you will find is my author page for this very blog.

There is a trade-off to using your full name when you post, however, and that’s privacy. As long as you’re proactively controlling the content that you put online, this shouldn’t be a problem. Plus, in the context of a small business blog, using your full name will help your customers put a face to a name and let them know that a real person is back there helping them with their problems.

Bring Your Social Networks Into Your Real Network

One of the things that small business owners sometimes forget to do is to carry over their web presence into their real lives. If you’re an avid social media user, make sure that you highlight that fact when you’re meeting with a client or possible business partner in real life. An easy way to do this is to list your social networking profiles on your business card. If you’re preferred method of communication is Twitter, shouldn’t you have your Twitter handle highlighted. Similarly, if you go to a networking event, don’t just write down your name on your nametag, throw in your web address as well.

Another way of incorporating your web identity into the real world is to investigate some of the small business resources in your community. Does your local chamber of commerce have a Twitter account or a Facebook Fan Page that you can connect with? Is there a meeting of dentists/decorators/hardware store owners/insert your job here coming up soon? Tweetups – Twitter meetups – are a great way to expand your network of contacts and promote your business in a real-life setting. If you sense that there isn’t a well-developed social media presence in your small business community, take the initiative to start one. If you become known as the social media guru of your town, not only does the value of your business rise, but so does your personal brand.

–

Finding ways to get ahead in a tough economy isn’t easy, but the business owners who take the time to explore the many powerful tools on the web will be rewarded for their efforts, both in their personal brand and their small business brand.

If all of this still sounds like too much for you, call 877-720-6488 to speak with one of our expert online reputation management consultants here at Reputation.com. You can also contact us online using this form. We love helping entrepreneurs promote themselves and their businesses online, and we’d be happy to help you too.